| 1. |
- Ade, Florian, et al.
(author)
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Incumbency effects in government and opposition : Evidence from Germany
- 2014
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In: European Journal of Political Economy. - : Elsevier BV. - 0176-2680 .- 1873-5703. ; 36, s. 117-134
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Do district incumbents in an election have an advantage, and if so, do these advantages depend on which party is in government? We estimate the incumbency effect for the direct district candidates in German federal and state elections using a regression discontinuity design (RDD). When studying the heterogeneity in these effects, we find that incumbents from both large parties, the center-right CDU and the center-left SPD, have an advantage only if the SPD is in government. This effect is robust and shows even in state elections that are unrelated to federal elections.
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| 2. |
- Freier, Ronny, et al.
(author)
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Do parties matter? Estimating the effect of political power in multi-party systems
- 2015
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In: European Economic Review. - : Elsevier BV. - 0014-2921 .- 1873-572X. ; 80, s. 310-328
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- When there are more than two parties, policy outcomes are typically the result of a bargaining process. We investigate whether changes in political power for various parties have an effect on tax policies. We use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in our variable of interest: voting power. In order to isolate close elections in a proportional election system, we develop a new simulation algorithm. Using data from German municipalities in the state of Bavaria, our estimation results suggest that political power does matter for policies. Somewhat surprisingly, the center-left party SPD is found to lower all three locally controlled taxes, whereas The Greens increase both property taxes considerably. These results remain robust across a range of specifications. Our partisan effect for the SPD is also confirmed by a simple regression discontinuity estimation using mayoral elections.
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| 3. |
- Freier, Ronny, et al.
(author)
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Do parties matter? : Estimating the effect of political representation in multi-party systems
- 2011
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper estimates the casual effect of political representation in local governments on tax policy in municipalities under a proportional election system. The main challenge in estimating the causal effect of parties on policy is to isolate the effect of representation from underlying voter preferences and the selection effect of parties. We use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in our measures of representation: seat shares and voting power. Using data from German municipalities our estimation results suggest that representation does matter. The effects are mostly small, but statistically significant. Somewhat surprisingly, representation of the center-left party is found to lower the local taxes, whereas The Greens increase the property tax considerably. These effects remain robust to weighting voting power by the likelihood of coalitions and different definitions of close elections and the instrument.
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| 4. |
- Odendahl, Christian, 1980-
(author)
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Parties, Majorities, Incumbencies : Four essays in political economics
- 2013
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained essays on political economics. The first paper studies the impact of having one party in government versus a coalition of parties, where the exogenous variation in the type of government stems from close election outcomes. It uses a new algorithm to detect these close elections in multi-party systems to answer this question. Based on data from more than 2,000 municipalities in the German state of Bavaria, it finds that single-party governments spend more, not less as is often concluded in the theoretical and empirical literature. The second paper uses the same method of detecting close elections to extract exogenous variation, but looks at the political power of parties and its effect on tax policies. It finds significant effects of party power that are mostly in line with expectations. The third paper looks at the transition of voters between parties in three consecutive elections for the state parliament in Bavaria, and infers parties’ ideological positions from these transition flows. After estimating the transition matrices with a method based on maximum entropy, it uses these matrices to compute a distance matrix and uses multi-dimensional scaling to place parties in a policy space. The resulting positions of parties are plausible, consistent across both transition periods, and comparable to those estimated with other methods. The final paper studies the heterogeneity in the advantage of incumbent district candidates in German federal and state parliament elections. In particular, it looks at the party in government, and how that affects the incumbency advantage of district candidates. It finds that an incumbency effect only exists (for both major parties) if the center-left SPD is in government, a heterogeneity that is robust across different specifications and jurisdictions.
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