Political competition and legislative shirking in roll-call votes: Evidence from Germany for 1953-2017

Arbeitspapier

We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures that there is always at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors from the same constituency from zero to four. We exploit the exogenous variation of elected competitors by investigating changes in competition induced by legislators who leave parliament during the legislative period and their respective replacement candidates in an instrumental variables setting with legislator fixed effects. The existence of elected competitors from the same constituency decreases absence rates in roll-call votes by about 6.1 percentage points, which corresponds to almost half of the mean absence rate in our sample. This effect is robust to the inclusion of other measures for political competition.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: CREMA Working Paper ; No. 2020-20

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior ; Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation ; Structure, Scope, and Performance of Government
• Thema: Political Competition ; Accountability ; Absence ; Rent Seeking ; Political Representation

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Frank, Marco ; Stadelmann, David
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA)
• (wo): Zürich
• (wann): 2020

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/225562
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:43 MEZ