The impact of incumbency on turnout. Evidence from Italian municipalities

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. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. We analyze how having an incumbent among candidates affects electoral turnout. We use a rich data set providing information on the electoral results of Italian municipal elections over the period 1993-2011. Endogeneity issues are handled through an instrumental variable approach using the mayor term-limit as an instrument for the presence of the incumbent mayor among candidates. Controlling for electoral competition, we find that the impact of incumbency is heterogeneous across geographical areas: incumbency increases turnout in the South of Italy, whereas we do not find any statistically significant effect in the North. As the positive effect holds true only for southern municipalities endowed with low levels of social capital we speculate that this is the result of incumbent politicians using their resources to establish clienteles.JEL Classification: D72, D78, J71, J16

Turnout in concurrent elections: Evidence from two quasi-experiments in Italy

“…Nannicini et al (2013) show that higher levels of social capital correspond to better political accountability. Using a sample of municipal elections in Italy, De Benedetto and De Paola (2016) argue that the strength of the clientelistic relationship between incumbent mayoral candidates and voters explains the positive (negative) effect of incumbency on turnout that the authors observe in regions with low (high) levels of social capital. Table 6 shows that southern regions are characterized by lower turnout across all election types.…”

Análisis de datos de panel en ciencia política: ventajas y aplicaciones en estudios electorales

“…Sin embargo, no todos los datos de panel se basan en encuestas por muestreo a personas, denominados «micropaneles» por la literatura en inglés (Baltagi, 2005). Las unidades de análisis también pueden ser países (como en Persson y Tabellini, 2003), regiones subnacionales (Sátyro, 2013), municipalidades (De Benedetto y De Paola, 2016), distritos electorales (Seijas, 2014) y gabinetes presidenciales (Escobar-Lemmon y Taylor- Robinson, 2005); en general, reconocidos como «macropaneles». Además, existen diseños sofisticados que combinan encuestas, anidando individuos en distintos países y en el tiempo, y que modelan más de un nivel de análisis -micro y macro-de forma longitudinal (Fairbrother, 2014).…”

Term limit extension and electoral participation. Evidence from a diff-in-discontinuities design at the local level in Italy

“…), while for each single elector the probability of affecting the electoral outcome is close to zero (Dows, 1957), understanding why people decide to vote is a challenging question. In order to give an explanation of the so-called "paradox of voting", describing the fact that in spite of the theoretical prediction of a very low turnout many people go to the polls (Fiorina, 1976), several determinants of the electoral participation have been investigated in the literature, focusing both on population's characteristics and on candidates' features (see among others McDermott, 2005;Sigelman et al,1995;De Benedetto and De Paola, 2016;De Benedetto and De Paola, 2017;De Paola et al, 2014;Kousser and Mullin, 2007). The impact of different institutional features has also been investigated with works analyzing the impact of electoral systems, voting mechanisms and electoral closeness (Nickerson, 2007;Kousser and Mullin, 2007;Funk, 2010, Cox andMunger, 1989;Denver and Hands, 1974;De Paola and Scoppa, 2013).…”