MPs' Expenditure and General Election Campaigns: Do Incumbents Benefit from Contacting their Constituents?

Most studies of the impact of local campaign expenditure on British election results have found that expenditure by incumbents has less of an effect on the outcome than does that by challengers. Some argue that this, in part, reflects an underestimate of how much is spent by incumbents because it excludes their expenditure under various parliamentary allowances which facilitates contacts between MPs and their constituents. Data on spending under those allowances are now available and are used here to evaluate its impact at the 2005 general election in England. The analyses show that only expenditure by Conservative MPs had any impact on their re-election chances.     

Fighting with one hand tied behind the back: political budget cycles in the West German states

Theories of political budget cycles have been contested because scholars find that incumbents can manipulate deficits in the pre-election period only if fiscal transparency is low. I argue that these findings do not generally rule out the possibility of fiscal electioneering. Governments may increase spending on highly visible policies. The composition of the budget serves as a second-best strategy. It increases political support without straining the budget balance. An empirical analysis of the West German states reveals alternative electoral budget strategies and ultimately point to the importance of analyzing how governments choose between alternative fiscal instruments.     

Do political budget cycles work? A micro-level investigation of pre-electoral budgeting and its electoral consequences

One of the most puzzling empirical patterns in political economy is the disconnect between the regular use of fiscal instruments for re-election purposes by incumbents (otherwise known as political budget cycles) on the one hand and their relative electoral ineffectiveness on the other. This article engages with this puzzle by shifting the analysis from the macro to the micro-level. It shows that when taking into account individual-level heterogeneity in the electoral response, one can gain a more nuanced understanding of the political consequences of pre-electoral budgeting. By relying on a set of multi-level random-effects regressions using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral System surveys, it points to two such sources of heterogeneity: social status and ideology. In particular, higher status individuals are considerably less responsive to pre-electoral deficits, though the effects depend on the composition of fiscal measures. Results for ideology are somewhat less consistent across different operationalizations of ideology as well as model specification.     

Local Pork-Barrel Politics in National Pre-Election Dates: The Case of Italy

Political representation in the national assemblies isgeographic and elected representatives care about whogains and who loses in their electoral districts. Since legislators are re-election oriented, theirchances of electoral success are directly associatedwith the net benefits delivered to their constituents. In this perspective, geography is not only the basisfor political organisation and representation, butalso the hallmark of distributive politics. In thiscontext, it is likely that locally elected politiciansand party leaders standing in national elections wouldtend to cooperate in pre-election dates. In thispaper we argue that local administrators have anincentive to manipulate local government outlays inconnection with national election dates to enhance there-election prospects of their national party leaders. In particular, given the matching character ofnational grants with local investment spending, weexpect that in pre-election dates local policy-makerswould be induced to raise investment outlays beyondtheir standard growth rate. This would determineinefficient local public spending as a result of thegeographically-based system of democraticrepresentation. The case study under our investigationis the behaviour of Italian local policy-makers inconnection with national election dates.     

Election results and opportunistic policies: A?new?test?of?the?rational political business cycle model

The literature on the rational PBC suggests that politicians systematically manipulate economic and fiscal conditions before elections to increase their chances of reelection. Most tests of this theory look for evidence of pre-election distortions in fiscal policy. We propose a new test that explores the two-way interaction between the magnitude of the opportunistic distortion and the margin of victory. The test is implemented using a large panel of Portuguese municipalities. The results show that opportunism leads to a larger win-margin for the incumbent and that incumbents behave more opportunistically when their win-margin is small. These results are consistent with the theoretical model.     

Educational business cycles

Strong institutional constraints and better-informed voters may lead re-election seeking incumbents to shift the use of political business cycle mechanisms away from monetary and fiscal policy towards other policy domains that are more easily manipulable, targetable, and timeable. We investigate teacher employment patterns at the state level in Germany and find strong evidence of cycling mechanisms, in the form of electioneering and honeymooning. Against a backdrop of a continuously shrinking total teachers’ pool, German state-level incumbents accelerate the hiring of new teachers during election periods and partly reverse this during politically safer points in the electoral cycle. Cycles are mediated by issue salience: heightened attention to German public schooling after the notorious PISA-2000 tests further strengthens the manipulation of new teacher hiring for electoral purposes.     

Sharing the Rewards,Dividing the Costs? The Electoral Consequences of Social Pacts and Legislative Reform in Western Europe

Do electoral pressures provide an explanation for why governments offer pacts to unions and employers rather than acting through legislation when faced with the need to pass potentially unpopular reforms to welfare policies, wages, and labour markets? This article addresses that question by analysing whether governments’ pursuit of pacts affects their vote share and increases the probability that they gain re-election for 16 West European countries between 1980 and 2012. It is found that the presence of social pacts has a significant and positive effect on incumbents’ vote shares at the next election and also results in a higher probability of re-election. These results are conditioned by government type: While all types of governments benefit electorally from pacts, the electoral penalties from the pursuit of unilateral legislation on policy reforms harm single-party majorities the most, minority governments moderately, and coalition majorities the least.     

Do female legislators benefit from incumbency advantage? Incumbent renomination in a flexible-list PR system

This study investigates whether female legislators, just like their male colleagues, also benefit from incumbency advantage in the form of privileged access to candidate selection. This is done by examining whether female and male MPs receive the same reward for equivalent political performance when renomination decisions are made by political parties. Political performance is conceptualised in terms of incumbents’ popularity among voters, readiness to vote along the party line and legislative activity. An original dataset comprising 1032 observations on Czech legislators elected between 1996 and 2017 is used in the analysis. The results suggests that well-performing female MPs are just as likely as their male colleagues to secure a favourable renomination outcome. This result should not, however, be interpreted as evidence of gender-neutral access to re-election and political seniority as past research clearly indicates that female MPs need to work harder than men to produce the same political output.     

A partisan model of government expenditure

Partisan models of budget politics largely concentrate on the size of government, budget deficits and debt, but most theories have little to say as to what the effect of party politics on both the size and the composition of budgets is. This paper seeks to extend previous literature in two directions. First, a model of spending preferences is developed that relates actors' preferred level and allocation of expenditure to electoral gains from fiscal policies. Second, changes in both total expenditure and the expenditure mix of two budget categories are analyzed for the effect of parties' spending preferences as stated in their election manifestos. Using data on 19 OECD countries from 1971 to 1999, the paper finds support for general partisan hypothesis. The results suggest that the actual spending preferences of parties matter whereas they do not indicate that parties of the left consistently differ from parties of the right in their spending behavior.     

Campaign spending and Senate elections, 1978–84

This paper uses a sample of recent Senate election results and estimates vote equations that show challenger spending hurts, and incumbent spending helps, incumbent re-election. While both types of spending have diminishing returns, the effects are asymmetrical. Challenger spending is more productive at lower levels of spending, but incumbents can spend greater amounts more profitably than can challengers. These results can explain why Senate incumbents spend money, why they typically outspend their challenger, and why incumbents who can outspend their challenger would tend to be against spending limits or public financing.However, the results do not explain why incumbent spending does not work in House election equations. Jacobson and others have run countless linear and quadratic specifications that persistently show perverse effects for incumbent spending. These results are not affected by the procedural problem of logging observations that have a value of zero, and pose a genuine puzzle. There are other empirical results suggesting the idea that there are basic differences in the nature of elections between the House and Senate. For example, Grier and Carlson (1988) find that state-level economic conditions have a strong effect on individual Senate elections, while Owens and Olson (1980) find that district-level economic conditions have no effect on House elections. Since I show that there are a significant number of elections where incumbent spending does matter, and that simultaneity bias may not be a tenable explanation for results where incumbent expenditures do not matter, it may be time to take a new look at the House data or to develop a testable theory that can explain persistant empirical differences in the determinants of elections in the House and Senate.     

Political budget cycles and election outcomes

This paper addresses two empirical questions. Is fiscal policy affected by upcoming elections? If so, do election-motivated fiscal policies enhance the probability of re-election of the incumbent? Employing data for 65 democratic countries over 1975–2005 in a semi-pooled panel model, we find that in most countries fiscal policy is hardly affected by elections. The countries for which we find a significant political budget cycle are very diverse. They include ‘young’ democracies but also ‘established’ democracies. In countries with a political budget cycle, election-motivated fiscal policies have a significant positive (but fairly small) effect on the electoral support for the political parties in government.     

Tax Expenditure Budgets, Budget Policy, and Tax Policy: Confusion in the States

A tax expenditure budget should contribute to efficient and effective public decisions by quantifying the division in the tax structure between provisions that represent revenue policy (distribute the cost of government according to the legislated tax base) and parts that represent budget policy (substitute for direct spending). For this transparency to have the desired impact, however, the tax expenditure budget process and the direct expenditure process must be properly integrated and the tax expenditure budget must make an accurate division between the parts of the tax structure. A review of the 33 states with tax expenditure systems shows many weaknesses in application of the concept and poor linkage to the direct spending budget system. Their most significant flaw is in dividing the tax structure into normal and preference elements; states need greater attention to defining their basic tax structure if they are to have a meaningful tax expenditure budget.     

Political budget cycles in the European Union and the impact of political pressures

This paper investigates the presence of political budget cycles (PBCs) in the European Union using data from all 27 member states over the period 1997?C2008, and explores their variability across countries and over time. Three basic results emerge: First, incumbent governments across the EU tend to engineer PBCs in order to enhance their re-election prospects. Second, PBCs are much larger and statistically more robust in the Eurozone countries than in the countries that have not yet adopted the euro. Third, the degree to which governments manipulate fiscal policy is negatively correlated with non-economic voting and positively correlated with electoral competitiveness.     

Budget Reform in Malaysia and Australia Compared

The study, using the recent contrasting experience of budget reform in Malaysia and Australia, inquires why quite similar changes were attempted in different socio-economic and fiscal settings. It explains why their implementation differed and identifies the factors that shaped, sustained, or impeded the respective efforts.
Three basic themes emerge. First, political and administrative will are necessary requirements for the success of any budget reform effort. Second, the more correspondent the bureaucratic culture is with the culture upon which the new budget system is premised, the more easily change occurs. Third, a model of reform predicated upon the assumption of fiscal restraint cannot effectively function in a climate of fiscal relaxation. Malaysia adapted its budget model from the Australian system. As the Australian model suited the paradigm of expenditure restraint, the adapted model proved less workable against the Malaysian climate of fiscal relaxation.     

Tax Expenditure Reporting: The Utilization of an Innovation

Central to this article is the question, “Are tax expenditure reports used?” State legislators serving on tax committees in ten states were surveyed regarding their use and their perceptions of others' use of tax expenditure report information. Responses indicate (1) strong acceptance and broad use of report information; (2) purposes and policy stages of use characteristic of technical information use; and (3) use focused predominantly on resource acquisition (revenue) policy rather than resource allocation (budget) policy. Thus it appears that tax expenditure reporting does not operate to secure budgetary control over tax expenditures, and consequently tax expenditures continue largely to escape budget scrutiny.     

I’m Not Voting for Her: Polling Discrepancies and Female Candidates

Although there is a large literature on the predictive accuracy of pre-election polls, there is virtually no systematic research examining the role that a candidate’s gender plays in polling accuracy. This is a surprising omission given the precipitous growth of female candidates in recent years. Looking at Senate and Gubernatorial candidates from 1989 to 2008 (more than 200 elections in over 40 states), we analyze the accuracy of pre-election polls for almost the complete universe of female candidates and a matched sample of white male cases. We demonstrate that pre-election polls consistently underestimate support for female candidates when compared to white male candidates. Furthermore, our results indicate that this phenomenon—which we dub the Richards Effect, after Ann Richards of Texas—is more common in states which exhibit traits associated with culturally conservative views of gender issues.     

Explaining the electoral effects of public investments: The case of the expansion of the underground in Madrid, 1995–2007

According to the literature, governments have strong incentives to use the public budget tactically in order to either obtain the electoral support of new voters or strengthen the loyalty of their traditional supporters. Yet vote‐seeking strategies only become rational when voters follow their self‐interest and reward governments when their constituency benefits from public transfers. The literature has focused on the governments' incentives, largely ignoring the importance of knowing whether the electorate is responsive to public investments. This study tests empirically whether incumbents strategically use public investments to gather more electoral support; and whether voters take these investments into account at the polls. These two questions are pursued simultaneously by using as a case study the expansion of the underground network in Madrid, Spain. Only a little evidence is found to support the idea that regional governments constructed new metro stations in neighbourhoods where they had more to gain electorally. Also, the inauguration timing strictly followed the electoral cycle, something that indicates a strategic calculus on the part of the incumbent. However, the models are also consistent with the idea that the government's investments were primarily driven by motives of efficiency. Indeed, although governments are tempted to follow vote‐seeking strategies, they are also aware that they cannot deviate too much from an efficiency‐based allocation of public resources. From the perspective of the voters, robust evidence has been found to show that regional voters rewarded this policy at the neighbourhood level. Neighbourhoods that received new metro stations voted in higher numbers for the incumbent than those quarters without new investments. All in all, these findings may have some implications for normative democratic theory.     

Politischer Opportunismus und Haushaltsdefizite in den westdeutschen Bundesländern

This article analyzes fiscal political business cycles in the West-German Länder. By linking the theory of political business cycles with the insights of the theory of economic voting, I argue that the German Länder governments do not have an incentive to raise the budget deficit in order to signal economic competence to the electorate. Despite having an incentive to spend more before an election in order to provide public goods to the voters, governments cannot finance the supply of public goods with higher deficits because voters prefer healthy fiscal policies. An empirical analysis of the West-German Länder between 1970 and 2003 bolsters the theoretical claims. A government that expands the deficit before an election thus experiences a loss in voter support. Consequently, governments tend to reduce the budget deficit in pre-election years.     

Political business cycles at the municipal level

The present article tests predictions of rational political business cycle models using a large and previously unexplored data set of Portuguese municipalities. This data allows for a clean test of these predictions due to the high level of detail on expenditure items, an exogenous fixed election schedule, and homogeneity of Portuguese local governments with respect to policy instruments and institutions. Estimation results clearly reveal the opportunistic behaviour of local governments. In pre-electoral periods, they increase total expenditures and change their composition favouring items that are highly visible to the electorate. This behaviour is consistent with an effort to signal competence and increase chances of re-election.