Politician Quality, Fiscal Policy and Ideology

The Advantage of Incumbents in Coalitional Bargaining

“…Policy-motivated parties could also desire to coalesce with other parties that have more experienced politicians who could be better at governing, boosting the bargaining prospects of such parties. If incumbents are better policy-makers-as suggested by Freier and Thomasius (2016) and Meriläinen (2020)-they might also be better at advancing common goals of the coalition partners, be such goals ideological or seeking policy improvements.…”

“…The approach that we adopt here is a slightly modified version of the identification strategy used by Hyytinen et al (2018a) to study the effects of political representation on public policies. See also Meriläinen (2020) who uses the same approach to study how politician competence shapes policy outcomes. in the close races.…”

Who Becomes a Member of Congress? Evidence from De-Anonymized Census Data

“…If on the other hand earnings ability and education do correlate with political ability-as an important strand of research in political economy argues (Besley, Montalvo, and Reynal-Querol 2011;Besley et al 2017;Meriläinen 2018)-then the relevant question is how much we want our political system to prioritize these abilities at the cost of preventing those with less access to education, and therefore less ability to earn, from becoming politicians. The value of having legislators with strong educational backgrounds and private-market success could be high, if these traits are useful for crafting better policy, but the costs of an unrepresentative legislature are also high, in part because rich legislators may be out of touch with the desires of their constituents (e.g., Gilens 2012), in part because having a broadly representative legislature might add legitimacy to the democratic process (e.g, Mansbridge 1999), and in part because such a legislature might be a normative goal in and of itself.…”

Electoral cycles in macroeconomic forecasts

“…See, for example,Meriläinen (2020) for a study of the links between politician quality and fiscal policy,Besley et al (2011) for the link between leader education and economic growth, andJones and Olken (2005) who show that changes in political leadership lead to changes in economic growth.9 To reduce the number of timing parameters in the model, we assume that the signals arrive and the forecasts are released at the same time as the election is held. 10 Note that during period one, the economic policy in period two is not yet realized.…”