Norms in Bargaining: Evidence from Government Formation in Spain

Abstract

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Direct democracy and government size: evidence from Spain

“…38 There are two forces behind this strong first stage: one is that the most voted party is more likely to have one more seat in the council, thus normally increasing its bargaining power to appoint the mayor; the second is that, even in cases in which the two most voted parties tie in seats, the most voted party is-surpisingly-much more likely to appoint the mayor. This phenomenon is studied in depth by Fujiwara and Sanz (2016).…”

Women’s Representation in Politics: Voter Bias, Party Bias, and Electoral Systems

“…We go further by showing that the norm applies differently by gender: the norm is followed when the two most voted councilors are of the same gender or when the first is male and the second is female, but not when the first is female and the second is male. We also provide evidence that, similarly to the norm in Fujiwara and Sanz (2018), the norm we identify is enforced by voters, who punish in the next election parties that do not follow it. Voters also enforce the gender differences: the punishment is larger (smaller) when the first is male (female) and the second is female (male).…”

“…14 Finally, we add to the growing literature on social norms-informal understandings that govern individual behavior in society-in political environments. On this front, our paper is most closely related Fujiwara and Sanz (2018). 15 They provide evidence of a norm that "the most voted party should form the government in a parliamentary system", and show that such norm has important implications for policy and the design of electoral systems.…”

“…Thus, we have to characterize the mayor selection process. We follow Fujiwara and Sanz (2018) in assuming that elections serve the purpose of aggregating information. Thus, election outcomes in the OL system inform voters on the quality of the candidates.…”

“…52 As a validity check, we show in figure A2 that the first and second most voted councilors are in fact equally likely to be female. Also note that, by design, all covariates that do not vary within a municipality-year are balanced, and that the standard errors are not affected by the double-counting of elections, as they are clustered by municipality (see Fujiwara and Sanz (2018) for more details on the identification approach). 53 The results from estimating equation ( 13) are in column (1) of table 5 and displayed graphically in figure 5.…”