The Runner-Up Effect

Rank effects in political promotions

“…Our paper provides several extensions to the literature on rank effects in politics (Crisp et al 2013;Anagol and Fujiwara 2016;André et al 2017). We also contribute to the literature on political selection and the design of electoral systems more generally.…”

“…Anagol and Fujiwara (2016) exploit regression discontinuity designs in Brazilian, Indian and Canadian first-past-the-post elections, documenting that second-place candidates are substantially more likely than close third-place candidates to win in subsequent elections. More closely related to our work on how parties make decisions are recent studies by Crisp et al (2013) and André et al (2017), who report correlational evidence from Belgium, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, indicating that in the case of semi-open lists, parties reward vote-earning candidates with better future pre-election list positions.…”

Norms in Bargaining: Evidence from Government Formation in Spain

“…Third, we contribute to a growing literature that brings "behavioral" insights and non-standard decision making to political economy contexts. 10 It is particularly related to models where voters see being a "winner" as having value in itself (Callander 2007, Callander and Wilson 2008, and Agranov, Goeree, Romero, and Yariv 2017 and evidence that rank-based decision making affects political outcomes Fujiwara 2016 andFolke, Persson, andRickne 2015). As previously discussed, by focusing on parties that almost tied in votes, our results indicate that agents respond to variations in rankings that provide no additional information conditional on the publicly available continuous variable that fully determines the ranking (vote shares).…”

“…Additionally, by focusing on parties that almost tied in votes, our results indicate that agents respond to variations in rankings that provide no additional information conditional on the publicly available continuous variable that fully determines the ranking (vote shares). This adds to evidence of rank-based decision in politics Fujiwara 2016 andFolke, Persson, andRickne 2015).…”

“…However, this behavior becomes coded as a heuristic based on ranks, which is applied even in the cases where the consequences are minimal (parties almost tying). A similar interpretation is that ranks are salient but the continuous variable that determines ranks are not, as suggested by the behavior of political agents ( Anagol and Fujiwara 2016;Folke, Persson, and Rickne 2015), consumers (Pope 2009), and investors (Hartzmark 2015 Empirical Implications. In the equilibrium described in Proposition 2, the most voted party always appoints the mayor.…”