Term limits and pork barrel politics

Bernhardt, Dan; Dubey, Sangita; Hughson, Eric

doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2003.10.008

Cited by 59 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Our approach stresses three salient 4 See, e.g., Ferejohn (1986), Reed (1994, Besley and Case (1995), List and Sturm (2006) or the overview in Persson and Tabellini (2000). An exception, however, is Bernhardt et al (2004). They study the e¤ect of term limits on the reelection rule in a political agency model with many legislators and distributive politics.…”

Section: The Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributive Politics and Electoral Incentives: Evidence from Seven US State Legislatures

Aidt

Shvets

2012

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

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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. We study the effect of electoral incentives on the allocation of public services across legislative districts. We develop a model in which elections encourage individual legislators to cater to parochial interests and thus aggravate the common pool problem. Using unique data from seven US states, we study how the amount of funding that a legislator channels to his district changes when he faces a term limit. We find that legislators bring less state funds to their district when they cannot run for re-election. Consistent with the Law of 1/N, this tendency is less pronounced in states with many legislative districts. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayJEL-Code: D720.

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Section: The Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributive Politics and Electoral Incentives: Evidence from Seven US State Legislatures

Aidt

Shvets

2012

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

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“…Finally, it would be worthwhile to extend our analysis along the lines of Bernhardt et al (2004), to consider how term limits affect outcomes. In simple versions of our model with a term limit of two, and two parties, all sufficiently moderate voters continue to benefit from party competition, but, for example with Euclidean preferences, one can construct parameterizations in which party competition raises turnover of incumbents (i.e., lemma 2 may cease to hold as we have v < w, but c > k), in which case voters with extreme ideologies prefer at large selection of candidates.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Period utilities are discounted by factor δ < 1. 6 We focus on symmetric, stationary and stage-undominated perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE). 6 To ease presentation, we abstract from ego rents from holding office.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the benefits of party competition

Bernhardt

Campuzano

Squintani

et al. 2009

Games and Economic Behavior

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We study the role of parties in a citizen-candidate repeated-elections model in which voters have incomplete information. We first identify a novel "party competition effect" in a setting with two opposing parties. Compared with "at large" selection of candidates, party selection makes office-holders more willing to avoid extreme ideological stands, and this benefits voters of all ideologies. We then allow for additional parties. With strategic voting, citizens benefit most when the only two parties receiving votes are more moderate. With sincere voting, even with three parties, extreme parties can thrive at the expense of a middle party; and whether most citizens prefer two or three parties varies with model parameters.

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“…In selecting policies, representatives typically care not only about winning, but also about their actions while in office, either through their own policy preferences or else in terms of the "effort" expended on their constituents' behalf. With the exception of Barro (1973), electoral accountability models assume some form of incomplete information is present: either the motivations of the representatives are known but their influence over policy, and hence over voter utility, is not (Ferejohn 1986, Austen-Smith andBanks 1989), or their influence over policy is known but their motivations are not (Reed 1994, Duggan 2000, Bernhardt et al 2004, Meirowitz 2007, or neither is known (Rogoff 1990, Banks and Sundaram 1993, 1998, Coate and Morris 1995, Fearon 1999. To date, all of this work has maintained the original Downsian assumption of a unidimensional policy space, conceptualized either as a space of effort levels or as an ideological dimension.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The existence of simple equilibria is proved, and it is shown that in all such equilibria, the median voter is decisive: a policy choice by an officeholder secures re-election if and only if it gives the median voter a payoff at least equal to the median's expected payoff from electing a challenger. This model has been extended to allow for term limits (Bernhardt et al 2004), for parties (Bernhardt et al 2005, Campuzano 2005, and for costly signaling in campaigns (Kang 2005).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Dynamic Model of Democratic Elections in Multidimensional Policy Spaces

Banks

Duggan

2008

QJPS

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We propose a general model of repeated elections. In each period, a challenger is chosen from the electorate to run against an incumbent politician in a majority-rule election, and the winner then selects a policy from a multidimensional policy space. Individual policy preferences are private information, whereas policy choices are publicly observable. We prove existence and continuity of equilibria in "simple" voting and policy strategies; we provide examples to show the variety of possible equilibrium patterns in multiple dimensions; we analyze the effects of patience and office-holding benefits on the persistence of policies over time; and we identify relationships between equilibrium policies and the core of the underlying voting game. As a byproduct of our analysis, we show how equilibrium incentives may lead elected representatives to make policy compromises, even when binding commitments are unavailable. We provide an informational story for incumbency * This paper was presented under the title "A Multidimensional Model of Repeated Elections" in seminars at Columbia, Cornell, MIT, NYU, and Yale, at the

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Term limits and pork barrel politics

Cited by 59 publications

References 10 publications

Distributive Politics and Electoral Incentives: Evidence from Seven US State Legislatures

Distributive Politics and Electoral Incentives: Evidence from Seven US State Legislatures

On the benefits of party competition

A Dynamic Model of Democratic Elections in Multidimensional Policy Spaces

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