The Right Type of Legislator: A Theory of Taxation and Representation

Mattozzi, Andrea; Snowberg, Erik

doi:10.3386/w24279

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(42 reference statements)

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“…Like us, Acemoglu and Robinson (2000), Lizzeri and Persico (2004), and Ashraf, Cinnirella, Galor, Gershman, and Hornung (2017) decompose the elite into groups by economic interest. Similarly, Mattozzi and Snowberg (2015) analyse a model of legislative bargaining with rich and poor legislators. None of these papers focus on the social distance between the elite and the citizenry.…”

Section: Existing Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Elite Identity and Political Accountability: A Tale of Ten Islands

Carvalho

Dippel

2016

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Emancipation of slaves in the 1830s transformed the political elites of the British-Caribbean plantation islands. New elites were more accountable to the citizenry. We develop a theory in which two factors limit and possibly reverse the effect of this on political outcomes, with legislators (i) 'stepping up to pass extractive policies and/or (ii) weakening democratic institutions. The theory is supported by an historical analysis of ten Caribbean plantation islands, based on original archival data on legislator race, occupation and roll-call voting. Eventually, all assemblies that experienced a significant change in composition dissolved themselves and converted to British 'Crown Rule'.

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Section: Existing Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Elite Identity and Political Accountability: A Tale of Ten Islands

Carvalho

Dippel

2016

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“…Some institutions may force voters to trade-off quality and representation. For example, poor and middle-class voters may support elite candidates, even though these can only credibly commit to their preferred policy of low taxation and limited redistribution, if such elite representatives are at the same time better able to secure pork for the voter's district (Mattozzi and Snowberg, 2018).…”

Section: Political Inequality and Adverse Political Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How do political elites persist? Political selection, political inequality and empirical historical research

Coppenolle

2020

Fr Polit

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How do political elites persist? In this article, I review selected research on who legislators are, how democratic institutions affect their selection and behaviour, as well as their persistence over the long run. The extent to which political elites persist, forms a measure of the level of political inequality between elites and citizens. I argue that political inequality in societies can be measured as the extent to which the same individuals, or families, monopolize political power. This operationalization travels well through space and time. In extreme forms of non-competitiveness, power is passed on within political dynasties, and power becomes essentially hereditary.Democratic competition is meant to break up the extreme political inequality associated with absolute, hereditary politics. We still insufficiently understand the exact institutional reforms under which hereditary political selection declined during European countries' evolution towards representative democracy (e.g. Offerlé, 1993) from the individual interests of those who decided to reform (Benoit, 2004, Capoccia andZiblatt 2010). Yet these questions were crucial for early elite theorists (e.g.Michels ([1911([ ] 1968([ ), Mosca ([1896([ ] 1939) who warned that all power has a tendency to become hereditary. To understand how institutions affect political selection, and long-run political inequality, we need to understand why individuals support (and largely continue to support) 1 the institutional equilibriums that make up their representative democracies. For this non-exhaustive review I draw on examples from the study of political inequality and political selection, broadly defined, and present some of my own recent contributions to this literature, about historical lotteries, legislative elites, and political dynasties in France and Britain. The focus in this work on highly unequal, early democratising countries addresses two important research

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“…Buisseret and Bernhardt (2018) focuses on international agreements and assumes no commitment: agreements can be re-negotiated. 12 9 For example, see Milesi-Ferretti et al (2002); Diermeier et al (2007); Bowen et al (2014); Kessler (2014); Beath et al (2016); Loeper (2017); Simon and Valasek (2017); Mattozzi and Snowberg (2018); Bouton et al (2020) and the literature therein.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Does the Winner Take It All? Redistributive Policies and Political Extremism

2020

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We show that regional heterogeneity of underlying fundamentals (e.g. economic history, geography, natural resources, social capital) can lead to extreme voting in federations. When the outcome of federal policies { such as transfer schemes, market regulation, migration targets { depends on these fundamentals, the set of regions that benefits or loses from such a policy is fixed exogenously (for each given policy). This creates a strategic incentive for the median voter to elect extremely protective federal representatives, who will distort redistribution in favour of their constituency by influencing the choice of the policy magnitude. Interestingly, the benefits of selecting tough negotiators outweigh those of belonging to the ruling coalition. We test our predictions by looking at parties' performances at national and European Parliament elections from 1990 onwards, and find that strategic voting is indeed Ushaped: winning and losing member states vote more extremely than those in the middle. Our online survey provides further evidence.

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The Right Type of Legislator: A Theory of Taxation and Representation

Cited by 9 publications

References 38 publications

Elite Identity and Political Accountability: A Tale of Ten Islands

Elite Identity and Political Accountability: A Tale of Ten Islands

How do political elites persist? Political selection, political inequality and empirical historical research

Does the Winner Take It All? Redistributive Policies and Political Extremism

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