Loss Aversion in Politics

Alesina, Alberto; Passarelli, Francesco

doi:10.1111/ajps.12440

Cited by 79 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…biased towards the status quo. The argument here is that individuals are generally resistant to change, and this may apply even stronger in times of crises (Barber et al, 17ed;Alesina and Passarelli, 2019).…”

Section: The Electoral Consequences Of a Global Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic Alignment in Times of Crisis: Voting at the Dawn of a Global Pandemic

Leininger¹,

Schaub²

2020

Preprint

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What is the impact of a global health crisis on political behavior? We study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on electoral choice based on the case of Germany, one of the countries most heavily affected by the crisis. Our data come from the German state of Bavaria, where local elections were held right at the beginning of the pandemic. The elections took place early during the outbreak when there was still substantial variation in the extent to which individual counties and municipalities were affected by the outbreak. This variation provides a unique opportunity to study the causal impact of an event that would shortly after grow into an all-encompassing epidemic. We provide evidence that shows that the disease spread across the state in a mostly haphazard fashion. This lack of a discernible pattern coupled with within-county estimation of effects and a difference-in-differences strategy allow us to causally asses the effect of the spreading of the virus on electoral outcomes. Our results show that the crisis strongly and consistently benefited the dominant regional party, the CSU, and its candidates. For 3 known cases per 100,000 inhabitants, vote shares increased by about 4 percent. We explain our findings with a strategic-alignment mechanism, whereby voters vote into power candidates that they deem most likely to be able to solicit support from higher levels of government. Our findings emphasize the merit of forward-looking theories of voting and provide insights on the functioning of democracy during times of crisis.

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Section: The Electoral Consequences Of a Global Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic Alignment in Times of Crisis: Voting at the Dawn of a Global Pandemic

Leininger¹,

Schaub²

2020

Preprint

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“… See Bisin et al . (), Prato () and Alesina and Passarelli () for theoretical models on the effects of discount rates and time horizons on policies. …”

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confidence: 99%

Old and Young Politicians

2018

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We consider the role of a politician's age in Italian municipal governments. When the term limit is not binding, younger mayors engage in political budget cycles more often than older mayors. Thus younger politicians behave more strategically in response to electoral incentives, probably because they expect to have a longer political career and stronger career concerns. We discuss and rule out several alternative interpretations. 706 ECONOMICA [OCTOBER P 8 k¼1 d k Elec m;t Â 1ðAge m;t 2 Bin k Þ þ g m þ f t þ m m;t . The sample is restricted to years following 'close' elections decided by a vote margin of 5 percentage points or fewer. The (omitted) reference age category is 18-30. Each included age bin is five years long, with the exception of the final bin, which is aggregated to avoid very small bin sizes.Economica

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“…2 Related Literature 1. Alesina and Passarelli (2015). This paper, henceforth AP, is the most closely related to what we do.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…This is one of the very few papers to incorporate loss-aversion into models of political choice. A recent important contribution by Alesina and Passarelli (2015), discussed in detail in Section 2 below, studies loss-aversion in a direct democracy setting, where voters vote directly in a referendum on the size of a public project or policy. However, to our knowledge ours is the first paper to study the effect of loss-aversion in a representative democracy setting.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Negative Voters? Electoral Competition with Loss-Aversion

Lockwood

Rockey

2020

The Economic Journal

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This paper studies the effect of voter loss-aversion in preferences over both candidate policy platforms and candidate valence on electoral competition. Loss-aversion over platforms leads to both platform rigidity and reduced platform polarisation, whereas loss-aversion over valence results in increased polarization and also the possibility of asymmetric equilibria with a self-fulfilling (dis)-advantage for the incumbent. The results are robust to a stochastic link between platforms and outcomes; they hold approximately for a small amount of noise. A testable implication of loss-aversion over platforms is that incumbents adjust less than challengers to shifts in voter preferences. We find some empirical support for this using data for elections to the US House of Representatives.

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Loss Aversion in Politics

Cited by 79 publications

References 49 publications

Strategic Alignment in Times of Crisis: Voting at the Dawn of a Global Pandemic

Strategic Alignment in Times of Crisis: Voting at the Dawn of a Global Pandemic

Old and Young Politicians

Negative Voters? Electoral Competition with Loss-Aversion

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