Political donations and the allocation of public procurement contracts

Titl, Vítězslav; Geys, Benny

doi:10.1016/j.euroecorev.2018.11.004

Cited by 57 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…(iv) Economic factors: accuracy of the estimation of the cost [11], contract renegotiation [12], risk and uncertainty in the contracts [13], estimation of bidder participation in tenders [14] and its impact on prices [15], and globalisation-companies competing in markets far away from their origin [1]. (v) Social factors: less tolerance for ine cient political management or political irregularities in the procedure [16] and greater transparency and exibility in award mechanisms between public procurement agencies and private companies [17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Procurement Announcements in Spain: Regulations, Data Analysis, and Award Price Estimator Using Machine Learning

et al. 2019

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The largest project managers and adjudicators of a country, both by number of projects and by cost, are public procurement agencies. Therefore, knowing and characterising public procurement announcements (tenders) is fundamental for managing public resources well. This article presents the case of public procurement in Spain, analysing a dataset from 2012 to 2018: 58,337 tenders with a cost of 31,426 million euros. Many studies of public procurement have been conducted globally or theoretically, but there is a dearth of data analysis, especially regarding Spain. A quantitative, graphical, and statistical description of the dataset is presented. Mainly, the analysis is of the relation between the award price and the bidding price. An award price estimator is proposed that uses the random forest regression method. A good estimator would be very useful and valuable for companies and public procurement agencies. It would be a key tool in their project management decision making. Finally, a similar analysis, employing a dataset from European countries, is presented to compare and generalise the results and conclusions. Hence, this is a novel study which fills a gap in the literature.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Procurement Announcements in Spain: Regulations, Data Analysis, and Award Price Estimator Using Machine Learning

et al. 2019

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“…There are other recent studies (e.g Jurajda and Münich (2015),Palguta and Pertold (2018),Palguta (2015),. andTitl and Geys (2019)) that have used the advantage of the empirically convenient environment of municipal and/or regional elections in the Czech Republic.8 The power of political parties over electoral results in European Parliament elections varies from country to country.9 The exact shares of candidates running on the ballots of national parties varies by election and depends on the classification of national parties and election coalitions of parties.…”

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confidence: 99%

Sorting of Candidates: Evidence from 20,000 Electoral Ballots

Svitáková

Šoltés

2020

SSRN Journal

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Using over 20,000 electoral ballots from proportional representation elections, we document that political parties systematically sort candidates on the ballots according to their valence and intra party value. Valence, measured by education level, captures the public value of the candidates, while intra party value, measured by political donations and membership, represents the value of the candidate to the party. The patterns we observe are consistent with market mechanisms between candidates and party leaders where the party leaders benefit from the valence and intra party value of candidates and offer ballot positions (i.e. the probability of winning a seat) in exchange. We show that candidates with high valence and those who possess more intra party value are placed in higher level positions, despite the fact that candidates with more intra party value tend to receive relatively fewer votes than their counterparts with the same characteristics in the same position on the ballot. We also show that as a party expects to hold more council seats and thus has more bargaining power over candidates, the share of their candidates with higher intra party value increases. Overall, we provide strong evidence that political parties skew political representation based on a quid pro quo relationship with the candidates.

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“…While we focus mostly on the U.S. setting, the effects of political money are of interest world wide Titl and Geys (2019),. for example, show how donations to winning politicians increases a firm's chances of receiving procurement contracts in the Czech Republic.…”

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confidence: 99%

Buying Campaign Investments with Policy Concessions

Sasso¹,

Alexander²

2020

Preprint

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Interest groups can influence governmental policy through multiple channels. First, they may spend money before elections to help elect their preferred candidate. Second, they may also lobby after the election to affect the implemented policy. We analyze a game-theoretic model of campaign spending and lobbying to understand the strategic relationship between these two means of outside influence. We consider how several lobbying environments, each featuring different access to the elected politician, affect both the willingness to spend during the campaign and the final policy. Campaign spending is a function of both expected final policy due to lobbying and also expected lobbying effort costs. We find that increased policy moderation often, but not always, accompanies decreased campaign spending. When extreme interest groups give campaign contributions in exchange for access, campaign spending decreases as policy becomes more extreme. Open-access lobbying, where all interest groups lobby regardless of ideological alignment, is always best for the voter. We then show that caps on campaign contributions may have minimal effect on policy because of later lobbying efficacy. Finally, we highlight comparative statics that predict different empirical patterns of contributions depending on whether politicians grant lobbying access to all interest groups or only to ideologically-aligned groups. Our results demonstrate that interest-group and candidate polarization must be considered relative to one another; the effect of greater interest-group polarization depends to a large extent on whether it implies more or less ideological proximity to the group's aligned candidate.

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Political donations and the allocation of public procurement contracts

Cited by 57 publications

References 40 publications

Public Procurement Announcements in Spain: Regulations, Data Analysis, and Award Price Estimator Using Machine Learning

Public Procurement Announcements in Spain: Regulations, Data Analysis, and Award Price Estimator Using Machine Learning

Sorting of Candidates: Evidence from 20,000 Electoral Ballots

Buying Campaign Investments with Policy Concessions

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