Electoral Accountability and Particularistic Legislation: Evidence from an Electoral Reform in Mexico

Abstract

Being able to hold politicians accountable is the hallmark of democracy, and central to this is the notion that politicians can run for reelection. Most research on reelection incentives compare politicians who are term-limited with those who are not. These studies concentrate mostly on relatively senior politicians in candidate-centered electoral systems. This article leverages a quasi-natural experiment posed by the staggered implementation of the 2014 Mexican Electoral Reform, which lifted an eighty-year-old ban on reelection. The author conducts a difference-in-differences analysis of the hypothesis that reelection encourages legislators to focus more on policies with the highest “electoral yield”—namely, particularistic legislation. Applying a correlated topic model to a new collection of transcripts from 6,890 legislative sessions in 20 Mexican states between 2012 and 2018, this article presents compelling evidence that it does, that the effect is synchronized with the electoral cycle, and that it is larger when the legislators’ political horizons are longer.

How Do Electoral Incentives Affect Legislator Behavior? Evidence from U.S. State Legislatures

“… 1 A closely related literature studies the effects of term limits on aggregate legislative outcomes. In an especially relevant recent paper, Motolinia (2021) documents how the removal of term limits and the resulting creation of electoral incentives changed the legislative focus of legislatures in Mexico. In a similar vein, Olson and Rogowski (2020) documents how state legislative term limits in the United States increased legislative polarization.…”

Electoral Systems And The Autocrat's Trade-Off: Evidence From The Russian Duma

“…Seats are filled through separate ballots: that is, Russian voters cast two votes, one for each list (Remington and Smith 1996). 12 Consequently, district deputies are encouraged to cater to geographically defined, smaller constituencies (Motolinia 2020).…”

“…Observing differences in parliamentary behavior across list affiliation tells us little about how elections matter. Any difference risks resulting from particular candidate types systematically selecting into one tier (Malesky and Schuler 2011;Motolinia 2020). Generally, it may be that district seats appeal to candidates driven by local issues, without elections themselves having any disciplinary power (Gagliarducci et al 2011).…”

Does Electoral Reform Change MPs’ Behavior? Evidence from Romania

“…The setting chosen displays the parameters of a quasi-natural experiment. This within-country approach keeps constant many institutional and political culture factors that could confound the analysis and hence ensures a more robust estimation of the consequences of electoral reform than crosssectional studies (Blais et al, 2011;Crisp and Ingall, 2002;Motolinia, 2021).…”