Legislators' behaviour and electoral rules: Evidence from an Italian reform

Abstract

We explore how electoral rules and cultural traits (namely, the degree of civicness) interact in shaping elected officials' behaviour. We use a dataset that includes the expenditure proposals sponsored by members of the Italian Senate from 1993 to 2012 (as well as other individual and district characteristics) and exploit the 2005 electoral reform that transformed a mainly majoritarian system into a proportional one. As a first step, we can confirm previous empirical findings: legislators elected in first-past-the-post districts show a higher propensity to sponsor locally-oriented bills and to put effort into legislative activity than those elected with a closed-list proportional system. More importantly, however, we find that the effects of the change in the electoral rules are muted in areas with a high degree of civicness. We also propose a simple theoretical probabilistic voting model with altruistic preferences that is able to rationalize this finding.

An Economic Assessment of the Evolution of the Corporate Tax System in Italy

“…A provision similar to that proposed in Italy was introduced in Belgium as from 2018. 21 See, among others, Nastri et al (2019). 22 For an analysis of the 2008 tax reform, see Zangari (2009).…”

“…7.4) and Annual Report2019 (p. 92 and Fig. 7.4).4For empirical evidence on the effectiveness of corporate tax incentives on stimulating private investments in the US, seeEdgerton (2010),Zwick and Mahon (2017) andOhrn (2018Ohrn ( , 2019; for the UK, Maffini et al(2019). As regards ACE regimes,Hebous and Ruf (2017) analyze empirically their effects on financing and investment choices by multinationals, and Hebous and Klemm (2018) provide a review of the empirical evidence on its effects on financial structures (where many studies rather consistently point to the effectiveness of ACE) and investment (where the…”

“…In their sample, this implies that on average a 10% reduction of the tax component of the user cost of capital would bring about in the long-run an increase of the capital-asset ratio by 4% and 7% for total capital and equipment, respectively. Steinmüller et al(2019) estimate a cross-country panel and use the EMTR, finding that on average a 10% increase of this variable triggers a 3.3% decrease in fixed asset investment. In their analysis of the effect of tax incentives in the UK,Maffini et al (2019) use the net-of-tax cost of a unit investment and estimate that a 1% decrease of this variable increases the investment rate by 8.3-9.9 percent.…”

Fiscal Space and the Size of the Fiscal Multiplier

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Mitigating the Tradeoff Between Proportionality and Accountability in Electoral Systems: Evidence from the Italian Senate 1994 – 2006

“…Very recently Albanese, Cioffi, and Tommasino (2019) have analyzed legislators' behaviour in the Italian Senate following the reform from the system analyzed in the present paper to a closed-list proportional system. They find that legislative targeting to districts, and legislative effort both drop after the reform.…”