Electoral rules, forms of government and redistributive policy: Evidence from agriculture and food policies

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWe investigate the effect of electoral rules and forms of government on public policy outcomes using a new dataset on agriculture and food policies from 74 countries over the 1960-2005 period. Using both cross-sectional and panel data analyses we find robust evidence that the specific nature of democratic institutions has important consequences for public policy. Proportional democracies and presidential democracies -compared to majoritarian and parliamentary democracies -give more public support to agriculture and less to food consumers. The magnitude of these constitutional effects are stronger for import-competitive sectors and staple food crops. The effects seem independent from the ideology orientation of governments.

Political competition and policy choices: the evidence from agricultural protection

“…Given the focus of our study, it is important to note that elections (and accompanying electoral competition) are one of the main political institution in democratic regimes. Third, Olper and Raimondi (, ) uncover this relationship further and show that the level of protectionism is higher under proportional representation as compared to majoritarian electoral rules. This is of importance especially in the light of political science literature pointing to a positive relationship between proportional elections and fragmentation of political system (the so‐called Duverger's law).…”

“…A growing number of recent articles have investigated how various aspects of political organization of a society affect agricultural policy outcomes (for an overview see Swinnen, ). These articles have examined agricultural protection from the point of view of the impact of democratic transitions (Olper et al., ), electoral rules (Olper and Raimondi, ), party ideology (Dutt and Mitra, ), or political liberties (Swinnen et al., ).…”

“…This may be of importance for at least three reasons. First, the existing studies document that agricultural protection depends on political regime and, especially, electoral rules (see, Olper et al., ; and Olper and Raimondi, ). More specifically, the level of protection increases with transitions to democracy and is higher under proportional representation.…”

Do economic sanctions affect protectionism? Evidence from agricultural support

“…The NRA is positive when agriculture is subsidized, negative when it is taxed, and 0 if net transfers are zero. This measure is based on the Agricultural Distortions data base (for details, please see Anderson & Valenzuela, ), and it is much more detailed than other possible measures of agricultural protection, because NRA directly measures the policy outcomes of interest, and thus less subject to measurement errors and subjective judgments (Olper & Raimondi, ).…”

Majoritarian systems, rural groups, and (arrested) welfare state development

“…Under majoritarian rules, farmers focused on influencing the two main parties, the Conservative-(Høyre) and Liberal Party (Venstre). This strategy was abandoned in 1920, coinciding with Norway introducing a PR system and the creation of the Farmer Party.10 This could contribute toOlper & Raimondi's (2013) findings that reform into PR increases agricultural subsidies. However, these authors do not investigate the interaction between electoral system and strength of agricultural interests.11 Appendices are in the Online Supplementary Material: INSERT LINK.12 One concern is that this variable is trending, and we deal with potential non-stationarity by estimating models with lagged dependent variables.…”