Candidates with policy preferences: A dynamic model

Wittman, Donald

doi:10.1016/0022-0531(77)90091-6

Cited by 289 publications

(159 citation statements)

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“…Wittman (1977Wittman ( , 1983, Calvert (1985) and myself (1988a) show that, under this assumption, the "median voter theorem" does not hold and different parties follow different policies when in office. Hibbs (1977Hibbs ( , 1987a applies this view to macroeconomic policy and argues (on empirical grounds) that Socialist Parties in Europe and the Democratic Party in the United States have been systematically more expansionary and less averse to inflation than Conservative Parties in 6.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Macroeconomics and Politics

Alesina¹

1988

NBER Macroeconomics Annual

368

115

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Introduction"Social planners" and "representative consumers" do not exist. The recent game-theoretic literature on macroeconomic policy has set the stage for going beyond this stylized description of policymaking and building more realistic positive models of economic policy. In this literature, the policymaker strategically interacts with other current and/or future policymakers and with the public; his behavior is derived endogenously from his preferences, incentives and constraints. Since the policymakers' incentives and constraints represent real world political institutions, this approach provides a useful tool for analyzing the relationship between politics and macroeconomic policy. This paper shows that this recent line of research has provided several novel, testable results; the paper both reviews previous successful tests of the theory and presents some new successful tests.Even though some pathbreaking contributions were published in the mid-1970s, (for instance, Hamada (1976), Kydland-Prescott (1977), Calvo (1978) the game-theoretic literature on macroeconomic policy has only in the last five years begun to pick up momentum after a shift attributed to the influential work done by Barro and Gordon (1983a,b) on monetary policy.A useful way to classify game-theoretic models of monetary policy is by the number and type of players involved in the game: a) games in which a single policymaker plays "against" the private sector of the economy. In these models the policymaker attempts to surprise the public with an unexpected monetary shock to reduce unemployment;1 1. The private sector is modeled as populated either by atomistic wage setters or by unions.In addition to Barro-Gordon (1983a,b) this model has been studied under different assumptions about agents' information by Canzoneri (1985), Backus-Driffill (1985a), Barro 14 -ALESINA b) games in which different policymakers are in office at different points in time; they are elected politicians who can be voted out of office in favor of their opponents;2 c) games in which two policymakers controlling different policy instruments are in office at the same time in the same economy. Several authors, in particular, study the consequences of different degrees of independence of the Central Bank from the executive;3 d) games with multiple policymakers in office in different economies at the same time; this is the literature on international policy coordination;4 This paper, which is not a survey of the game-theoretic literature on macroeconomic policy5, focuses on empirical implementations of politicoeconomic models, and thus on the groups b) and c).The positive and normative implications of these models depend crucially on the objectives the policymakers pursue. In general, politicians have two motivations. On one hand, they wish to remain in office as long as possible. In this case, the politicians of any party have the same objective function, since they all seek to maximize popularity. On the other hand, they may have references defined on policy issues and...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Macroeconomics and Politics

Alesina¹

1988

NBER Macroeconomics Annual

368

115

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“…1 Consequently, politicians from different political wings -usually distinguished in left and right -differ in their political actions and in the expectations their incumbency generates among citizens. Concerning growth-relevant economic policies, partisanship can then be interpreted as the proxy for a set of preferred policies typically ascribed to the ideological wings: whereas left-wing 1 Formal foundations of this literature and the conditions under which these distinctive preferences are actually reflected in policy outcomes can be found in Wittman (1977) and Calvert (1985).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Words speak louder than actions: The impact of politics on economic performance

Osterloh

2012

Journal of Comparative Economics

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Die Dis cus si on Pape rs die nen einer mög lichst schnel len Ver brei tung von neue ren For schungs arbei ten des ZEW. Die Bei trä ge lie gen in allei ni ger Ver ant wor tung der Auto ren und stel len nicht not wen di ger wei se die Mei nung des ZEW dar.Dis cus si on Papers are inten ded to make results of ZEW research prompt ly avai la ble to other eco no mists in order to encou ra ge dis cus si on and sug gesti ons for revi si ons. The aut hors are sole ly respon si ble for the con tents which do not neces sa ri ly repre sent the opi ni on of the ZEW.Download this ZEW Discussion Paper from our ftp server:ftp://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/dp/dp10092.pdf Non-technical summaryIn this paper, we present a new approach to disclose the impact of policy preferences of parties on economic growth. We derive policy preferences of parties, such as political ideology and preferences restricted to single policy dimensions, from the content analysis of party manifestos. This data is obtained from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), an international large scale project in political science that has collected the wording of thousands of election manifestos. These are coded according to the frequency of sentences devoted to 56 different policy issues, which comprise economic and non-economic issues and are regarded as proxies for the party preferences in the related political science literature. Based on this data, it is possible to calculate indices for the general left-right position as well as concerning specific policy areas that represent the political preferences of the parties or legislatures.In the empirical section, we analyse per capita GDP growth in a panel of 23 OECD countries for the period 1971-2004. We estimate several models containing a set of typical control variables; fixed effects control for time-invariant country-specific influences. First, we follow an approach which is typical for the empirical political economics literature and employ dummy variables for the differentiation of left-wing and right-wing governments.However, we are not able to detect a significant impact of partisanship on growth rates.This implies that partisanship defined according to the broad distinction between leftwing and right-wing governments cannot be proven to affect economic growth.Then we proceed with analyses based on 7 indices that account for the political preferences concerning different policy areas. These indicators are first tested individually in our empirical model, and then jointly in a model averaging procedure, the weighted averaged least squares (WALS) method. A strong and robust negative impact on economic growth can be detected for parties that support market interventions, whereas a positive impact can be found for parties that aim at setting incentives for business as well as those which promote technology and infrastructure. Welfare state policies are also found to have a significant negative effect in our classical estimations, but show a much weaker impact in our WALS analysis. These results are robust to...

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“…Second, Proposition 4.1 differs qualitatively from the assumption that politicians have their own personal preferences over policy, as in Wittman (1977), Calvert (1985, and Roemer (2002). In those models, the politicians in a party have common policy preferences and want policy to move in that direction.…”

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confidence: 89%

“…He argues that one of the crucial functions of and special interest groups. Examples include Aranson and Ordeshook (1972), Wittman (1977Wittman ( , 1983, Enelow and Hinich (1981), Aldrich (1983), Palfrey (1984), Bernhardt and Ingberman (1985), Calvert (1985), Aldrich and McGinnis (1989), Cox (1990), Ingberman and Villani (1993), Londregan and Romer (1993), Baron (1994), Snyder (1994, Snyder and Ting (2002), Poutvaara (2003), Schofield (2004), Serra (2005), and Callander (2005). With the exceptions of Snyder (1994) and Snyder and Ting (2002), however, these models either explicitly or implicitly deal with a single district or parties with collective preferences.…”

Section: Votingmentioning

confidence: 99%

When parties are not teams: party positions in single-member district and proportional representation systems

2011

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1 We wish to thank Kristen Kanthak, Jiyoon Kim, Rebecca Morton, and participants at workshops at Harvard University and Princeton University for their comments. Please direct all communications to James M. Snyder, Jr., at jsnyder@gov.harvard.edu. Keywords: political economy; elections; political parties. JEL classification, 1235: Political Economy. AbstractTheoretical analyses of party positions commonly assume that parties act as teams to maximize their legislative representation. This assumption runs counter to another line of theorizing in which individual legislators maximize their own chances of winning reelection.To resolve this tension, the paper presents a model of party platform choice that relaxes only the assumption that parties are teams in the classical two-party spatial model. Platforms are chosen by majority rule among all legislators within a party. Politicians seek to win their own seats in the legislature, but they must run under a common party label. In both singlemember district and proportional representation systems, equilibrium platforms are shown to diverge substantially, with one party located near the 25th percentile of the voter distribution and the other near the 75th percentile, rather than converge to the median. The model also yields predictions concerning short-term economic shocks, incumbency advantages, and gerrymandering.1

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Candidates with policy preferences: A dynamic model

Cited by 289 publications

References 4 publications

Macroeconomics and Politics

Macroeconomics and Politics

Words speak louder than actions: The impact of politics on economic performance

When parties are not teams: party positions in single-member district and proportional representation systems

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