Dancing with the Populist: New Parties, Electoral Rules and Italian Municipal Elections

Bordignon, Massimo; Colussi, Tommaso

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3708637

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Close-election sharp RDD is a common method for estimating the effect of winning candidates' characteristics on downstream outcomes. This approach has been used in the context of Italian municipalities by Gagliarducci and Paserman (2012) and Casarico, Lattanzio, and Profeta (2021) to estimate the effect of electing a female mayor on government termination and fiscal policy, by Romarri (2020) to estimate the effect of electing a far-right mayor on hate crimes, and by Bordignon and Colussi (2020) to estimate the effect of a populist candidate reaching the second round of the elections on voters' turnout and descriptive representation. Formally, let E be a set of municipal elections in which one populist candidate runs against one or more non-populist candidates.…”

Section: Close-election Regression Discontinuity Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Costly Commitment: Populism, Economic Performance, and the Quality of Bureaucracy

Bellodi

Morelli

Vannoni

2023

American J Political Sci

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We study the consequences of populism for economic performance and the quality of bureaucracy. When voters lose trust in representative democracy, populists strategically supply unconditional policy commitments that are easier to monitor for voters. When in power, populists try to implement their policy commitments regardless of financial constraints and expert assessment of the feasibility of their policies, worsening government economic performance and dismantling resistance from expert bureaucrats. With novel data on more than 8,000 Italian municipalities covering more than 20 years, we estimate the effect of electing a populist mayor with a close‐election regression discontinuity design. We find that the election of a populist mayor leads to smaller repayments of debts, a larger share of procurement contracts with cost overruns, higher turnover among top bureaucrats—driven by forced rather than voluntary departures—and a sharp decrease in the percentage of graduate bureaucrats.

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Section: Close-election Regression Discontinuity Designmentioning

confidence: 99%