On the Validity of the Regression Discontinuity Design for Estimating Electoral Effects: New Evidence from Over 40,000 Close Races

Eggers, Andrew C.; Fowler, Anthony; Hainmueller, Jens; Hall, Andrew B.; Snyder, James M.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2265625

Cited by 107 publications

(130 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…According to their view, these imbalances do not pose any problems to elections RDD as long as a polynomial of the forcing variable is included (which I do as well). Furthermore, Eggers et al (2013) show that problematic imbalances seem to be a US House anomaly during the period after WWII. Investigating more than 40,000 close races in several countries, they do not find imbalances in any other electoral context (including, for example, US statewide and state legislative elections).…”

Section: D1 Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Divided we reform? Evidence from US welfare policies

Bernecker

2016

Journal of Public Economics

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Divided We Reform? Evidence from US Welfare Policies Abstract Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data regressions show that under divided government a US state is around 25% more likely to adopt a welfare reform than under unified government. An analysis of close elections providing quasi-random variation in the form of government and other robustness checks confirm this counter-intuitive finding. The empirical evidence is consistent with an explanation based on policy competition between governor, senate, and house. JEL-Code: D720, D780, H110, H750. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may

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Section: D1 Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Divided we reform? Evidence from US welfare policies

Bernecker

2016

Journal of Public Economics

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“…22 Eggers et al (2015) show that this problem is more severe in the U.S. House elections, where electoral competition is extremely high, but it is almost irrelevant in other countries like the UK, France and Germany.…”

Section: Rd Estimatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tenure in Office and Public Procurement

Coviello

Gagliarducci

2017

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

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We study the impact of politicians' tenure in office on the outcomes of public procurement. To this purpose, we match a data set on the politics of Italian municipal governments to a data set on the procurement auctions they administered. In order to identify a causal relation, we apply two different identification strategies. First, we compare elections where the incumbent mayor barely won another term, with elections where the incumbent mayor barely lost and a new mayor took over. Second, we cross-validate these estimates using a unique quasi-experiment determined by the introduction of a two-term limit on the mayoral office in March 1993. This reform granted one potential extra term to mayors appointed before the reform. The main result is that an increase in the mayor's tenure is associated with ``worse'' outcomes: fewer bidders per auction, a higher cost of procurement, a higher probability that the winner is local and that the same firm is awarded repeated auctions. Taken together, our estimates are informative of the possibility that time in office progressively leads to collusion between government officials and a few favored local bidders. Other interpretations receive less support in the data

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“…This means that we assume that parties cannot fully manipulate their vote share so as to be just below or (more likely) above the threshold. Although in free and fair elections it is hard to see how this assumption can be violated, previous studies on incumbency advantage have suggested possible sorting mechanisms (Caughy and Sekhon, 2011;Eggers et al, 2015). 20 We test for sorting in the forcing variable using the McCrary (2008) density test.…”

Section: Robustness Checks and Diagnosticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The National Effects of Subnational Representation: Access to Regional Parliaments and National Electoral Performance

Dinas

Foos

2017

QJPS

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According to scholarly wisdom, party competition at the subnational level plays a negligible role in national elections. We provide theory and evidence that qualifies this view. Subnational elections determine entrance into subnational parliaments, which provides essential organizational resources: members and money. Since in most cases the same political actors compete at all levels of government, they can make use of these resources to improve their status in national party competition. We test our argument exploiting two institutional features of the German multi-level electoral context: the discontinuities generated by the 5% electoral threshold in German state elections, and the occurance of German state elections at different times in the federal election cycle. We find that parties that marginally cross the threshold for state parliamentary representation gain more members, and eventually perform better in national elections, but only if the party has sufficient time to organize between the state and the federal election. Consistent with our organizational explanation, bottom-up effects are more pronounced where state parliamentary parties receive more * We would like to thank Alex Coppock, Andy Eggers, Bob Erikson, Edward Fieldhouse, Shigeo Hirano, Camille Strauss-Kahn, Catherine de Vries, two anonymous reviewers, and the QJPS editors for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. As a result this paper has been Online Appendix available from: http://dx

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On the Validity of the Regression Discontinuity Design for Estimating Electoral Effects: New Evidence from Over 40,000 Close Races

Cited by 107 publications

References 46 publications

Divided we reform? Evidence from US welfare policies

Divided we reform? Evidence from US welfare policies

Tenure in Office and Public Procurement

The National Effects of Subnational Representation: Access to Regional Parliaments and National Electoral Performance

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