Electoral competition and endogenous political institutions: Quasi-experimental evidence from Germany

Abstract

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Inter-municipal cooperation in administrative tasks – the role of population dynamics and elections

“…Next to political parties active on national level -the largest among them being the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) -so-called Free voter associations play a significant role in local politics. They are not formally connected to any political party active on the national level, nor are they associated with a particular political ideology (e.g., Blaeschke, 2014;Baskaran and Lopes da Fonseca, 2016).…”

Regression Discontinuity Designs Based on Population Thresholds: Pitfalls and Solutions

“…An example of this type of second‐order policy is given in Lyytikäinen and Tukianen (): The maximum number of candidates on electoral lists in Finland is a function of the council size, which changes discontinuously at population thresholds . Another example from Baskaran and Lopes da Fonseca () highlights how subtle the interactions among policies can be: In German municipal elections, parties winning less than a certain vote share are denied representation on the council; this constraint is never binding when the municipal council is below a certain size, which implies that there is a population threshold at which the council size increases and a vote share cutoff goes into effect (though this would not be clear without detailed knowledge of the electoral system). In short, a researcher should know a setting intimately before concluding that a given policy (and not other policies) changes at a given population threshold.…”

Regression Discontinuity Designs Based on Population Thresholds: Pitfalls and Solutions

“…10 Another example from Baskaran and Lopes da Fonseca (2015) highlights how subtle the interactions among policies can be: in German municipal elections, parties winning less than a certain vote share are denied representation on the council; this constraint is never binding when the municipal council is below a certain size, which implies that there is a population threshold at which the council size increases and a vote share cutoff goes into effect (though this would not be clear without detailed knowledge of the electoral system). In short, a researcher should know a setting intimately before concluding that a given policy (and not other policies) changes at a given population threshold.…”

“…An example of this type of second-order policy is given in Lyytikäinen and Tukianen (2013): The maximum number of candidates on electoral lists in Finland is a function of the council size, which changes discontinuously at population thresholds. 7 Another example from Baskaran and Lopes da Fonseca (2015) highlights how subtle the interactions among policies can be: In German municipal elections, parties winning less than a certain vote share are denied representation on the council; this constraint is never binding when the municipal council is below a certain size, which implies that there is a population threshold at which the council size increases and a vote share cutoff goes into effect (though this would not be clear without detailed knowledge of the electoral 5 In Germany and other federal systems, the task of locating relevant thresholds is complicated by the fact that higher-level authorities may also enact policies based on municipal population thresholds; in Germany, for example, the Federal Statistical Office used a different procedure to implement the 2011 census for municipalities above and below 10,000 inhabitants. 6 In the first article for Bavaria in Germany, see Egger and Koethenbuerger (2010); the authors studied the effects of council size on municipal expenditures using population-threshold rules for council size.…”