vote buying with multiple distributive goods within the rich literature on distributive politics models of vote buying treat the distributive logic of different particularistic incentives as theoretically similar this article relaxes that a

democracy and human capital formation education spending in latin america 1980 to 1997 this article examines the relationship between democratic representation and spending on education in latin america the authors assess the impact that democracy has on the distribution of resources between different levels of schooling and on total spending on education specifically they test whether democratic governments allocate a greater share of resources to primary education the level that benefits the largest segment of the electorate and that is most critical for human capital formation in developing countries using time series cross sectional analysis the authors find that democracies devote a higher percentage of their educational resources to primary education and that they maintain higher absolute spending levels on education in the aggregate thereby enhancing the prospects of human capital formation

equality employment and budgetary restraint the trilemma of the service economy this article presents an analysis of the postindustrial economy from a political economy perspective it identifies a set of specific distributional trade offs associated with the new role played by the services sector as the chief source of employment growth in advanced democracies over the last three decades it is argued that three core policy objectives budgetary restraint wage equality and expansion of employment constitute a political trilemma that allows only two of the goals to be successfully pursued at the same time using a combination of statistical and case oriented analysis the authors demonstrate the political and economic salience of the trilemma the distributional tensions inherent in each strategy to cope with it and the political institutional constraints under which these strategies are chosen

equal votes equal money court ordered redistricting and the distribution ofpublic expenditures in the american states a study of the effects of legislative re districting in the states during the 1960 s also contains data file

economic reform and public opinion in peru 1990 1995 even if they are confident that prosperity lies just over the horizon politicians who embark on promarket reforms know they are in for some stormy weather how will they fare in voters eyes once the pain is felt will voters inevitably turn against politicians who impose painful measures without an electoral mandate to do so the story of economic reform and public opinion in peru under alberto fujimori 1990 1995 poses just these questions the author uses monthly public opinion polls and monthly economic data to analyze the impact of economic changes during fujimori s reform program on opinions of the reforms and the president the author finds that limenos withdrew support from the program and the president when employment fell and inflation rose responses consistent with the findings of the economic voting literature but when real wages fell they became optimistic about the future and more likely to support reforms and the government

optimal pricing in electrical networks over space and time an electrical system is modelled with a transmission network customers central generators and independent generators the system is subject to stochastic failures and stochastic demand parameters optimal spot prices are derived for the system they vary stochastically with space and time and depend on electrical load flow patterns the price difference between two locations or two voltage levels and the wheeling charge between them will change magnitude and sometimes sign over time as a function of events throughout the network current spatial pricing methods are significantly different from the spot price based methods derived here

fiscal policy outcomes and electoral accountability in american states clear fiscal policy effects appear in american state gubernatorial and legislative elections between 1968 and 1992 independent of the effects of incumbency coattails term limits and macroeconomic conditions the results show that accountability is generally stronger following a period of unified party control than under divided government voter reactions to taxes and spending relative to the state economy are conditional on expectations which differ for each party net of these expectations republican gubernatorial candidates lose votes if their party is responsible for unanticipated increases in the size of the state budget democrats do not and indeed may be rewarded for small increases independent of this the incumbent governor s party is punished in legislative elections for failing to maintain fiscal balance taken together these results show how electoral accountability for fiscal policy outcomes is strong but highly contingent on a complex configuration of party labels partisan control expectations and institutions

how efficient is the voting market it is by now well established that good macroeconomic conditions benefit the incumbent president and his congressional party confreres at the polls this result is not unanimous see for example stigler or arcelus and meltzer2 and may not be universal 3 however the basic results in kramer 4 the progenitor of the modern literature on the effect of economic conditions on elections seem to have stood the test of time the broad consensus of this literature is that voters in presidential and congressional elections 1 reward income growth and punish unemployment and inflation 2 probably give greater weight to income growth than to unemployment and inflation and 3 myopically ignore any information beyond the recent past say prior to the election year 5 so far however the data have outrun interpretation while economic conditions seem to matter we do not know why they matter or how plausibly to characterize the process by which voters translate information about economic conditions into voting decisions this article tries to fill that gap though it extends the empirical literature to gubernatorial elections its main con

opposition parties and the urban poor in african democracies africa s urban poor increasingly represent a key constituency for electoral mobilization opposition parties which are pivotal for democratic consolidation have nevertheless exhibited disparate success at obtaining votes from this constituency to explain why this study focuses on the case of zambia and draws on interviews with political elites as well as a survey of informal sector workers in lusaka instead of vote buying ethnic alignments or economic voting these data show that the urban poor s voting decisions are related to the strategies used by political parties to incorporate them into the political arena opposition parties that employ populist strategies are more likely to win support from the urban poor than parties reliant on alternative modes of mobilization the advantages of a populist strategy include greater differentiation from the myriad of purely personalistic parties in africa and greater congruence with the policy priorities of the urban poor including service delivery and jobs

the presidency regionalism and distributive politics in south korea although whether there is political influence on distributive policies is now indisputable important debates have emerged about how politics distorts distributive policy outcomes in this article

mass organization and the durability of competitive authoritarian regimes evidence from venezuela many studies highlight the critical roles of political parties in enhancing autocratic durability mainly emphasizing mechanisms related to elite cohesion the role of a mass party organization in stabilizing autocracies though well recognized has received relatively less emphasis this article argues that the import of mass organization on autocratic durability is likely to vary with autocratic regime type and be greatest in competitive authoritarian regimes i then exploit unusual survey data and an original data set containing information on 18 037 regime affiliated communal councils to examine the effects of a regime affiliated mass organization on the incumbent vote in venezuela the formation of communal councils exerted a large effect on incumbent support but the strength of this effect varied depending on whether councils were located in communities receiving high levels of material resources these findings suggest that mass organization can greatly enhance competitive authoritarian durabilit

micro targeting and polarization abstract this paper connects the rise in polarization to changes in media technology which allow for higher precision in the advertising strategy of candidates candidates place ads in media outlets whose audiences differ in ideology and size we develop the concept of media centrality which takes into account differences in the media network and in ideology media centrality leads to a simple characterization of both the optimal targeting strategy and policy we show that generally a more fragmented media landscape leads to an increase in polarization

strategic self dispatch considering ramping costs in deregulated power markets ramp rates of generators are generally specified within elastic range of the strength of the shaft to safeguard the rotor from fatigue these limits can however be exceeded albeit at the risk of reducing the rotor life such effects on the rotor life can be compensated by incorporating appropriate ramping costs power demand and power price in deregulated power markets have shown a tendency of sudden wide excursions over short intervals of time the ability to respond to such fast change in demand and price can be quite rewarding this provides the motivation to utilize the ramping rates beyond traditional elastic limits this paper studies the strategic use of ramping rates beyond elastic limits in a power producer s self dispatch in a power market with price and demand volatility a set of ramping processes has been developed from ramping cost versus ramping time relationships to derive the total operation cost including ramping costs for various levels of ramping rates exceeding elastic limits a thorough theoretical analysis has been conducted for the selection of the optimal ramping process under different conditions a numerical example is presented to highlight the potential benefits from the optimal use of these ramping processes it is seen that the benefit from the strategic use of ramp rates beyond elastic limits not only depends on the high price in the power market but also on the initial loading of the generator which limits the capacity available for dispatch

senate representation and coalition building in distributive politics p7 vhe senate s equal representation of states shapes coalition building in distributive politics the great variation in state population means that some states have far greater need for federal fttnds than others but all senators have equal voting weight as a result even though all senators votes are of equal value to the coalition builder they are not of equal prwice coalition builders can include benefits for small states at considerably less expense to program budgets than comparable benefits for more populous states building on formal models of coalition building two hypotheses are developed and tested first coalition builders will seek out less costly members to build supportive coalitions efficiently second the final outcomes of distributive policy will more closely reflect the preferences of small state senators than large state senators the hypotheses are tested by examining the 1991 and 1997 98 reauthorizations of federal surface transportation programs the findings support both hypotheses

on the vote purchasing behavior of incumbent governments a couple of months before the swedish election in 1998 the incumbent government distributed 2 3 billion sek to 42 out of 115 applying municipalities this was the first wave of a four year long grant program intended to support local investment programs aimed at an ecological sustainable development this temporary grant program differs from traditional intergovernmental grants in several aspects most importantly in the sovereign decision making power given to the incumbent central government in this paper we investigate whether there were any tactical motives behind the distribution of these grants we find support for the hypothesis that the incumbent government used the grant program under study in order to win votes in particular we find strong support for the lindbeck weibull dixit londregan model in which parties distribute transfers to regions where there are many swing voters this result is statistically as well as economically significant we do however not find any support for the model that predicts that the incumbent government transfer money to its own supporters

neoliberalism and lower class voting behavior in peru it is often assumed that lower classes will resist market oriented neoliberal reforms that impose economic austerity on popular sectors and exacerbate social inequalities however the peruvian cas

the political economy of expenditures by the peruvian social fund foncodes 1991 95 the peruvian social fund foncodes was created by president alberto fujimori in 1991 with the stated objectives of generating employment alleviating poverty and improving access to social services this article uses province level data on monthly expenditures socioeconomic indicators and electoral outcomes to analyze political influences on the timing and geographic distribution of foncodes expenditures between 1991 and 1995 i reach three main conclusions first these expenditures increased significantly before national elections second foncodes projects were directed at provinces in which the marginal political effect of expenditures was likely to be largest third these projects favored the poorest provinces which suggests that the program also had a redistributive function the results are robust to a large number of specifications and controls the peruvian data support predictions made in the literature on political business cycles as well as the literature on political influences on the allocation of discretionary funds

swallowing the bitter pill sources of popular support for neoliberal reform in latin america what accounts for the surprisingly widespread popular approval that painful neoliberal reforms elicited in several latin american countries this article compares the explanatory power of two rival hypotheses which draw on conventional rational choice and psychological decision theory the compensation hypothesis claims that governments can engineer support for costly reforms by compensating the losers through targeted social benefits the rescue hypothesis questions this claim and maintains that draconian adjustment only finds support if it promises to revert a deep crisis and avert further losses data from argentina bolivia brazil mexico peru and venezuela suggest that the rescue hypothesis accounts much better for the initial endorsement of neoliberal shock programs immediately after their enactment when these shock programs bring about economic stabilization and recovery targeted social benefits help consolidate support for neoliberalism which a statistical analysis of the impact of social s

the political costs of taxes and government spending the marginal political costs of different types of taxes and government spending as well as voter preferences over different fiscal variables are examined using two different specifications for political cost one based on the probability of incumbent defeat and the other based on the incumbent s percentage of the vote models associated with these two specifications in which voting behaviour depends on disaggregated taxes and government expenditures are estimated using clata from canadian provincial elections the empirical results which indicate that different types of taxes and expenditures have quite different marginal political costs have important implications for models that incorporate voter pref erences

the macroeconomics of populism in latin america by populism this paper refers to an economic approach that emphasizes growth and income redistribution and deemphasizes the risks of inflation and deficit finance external constraints and the reaction of economic agents to aggressive nonmarket policies it analyzes two instances of populism chile under allende and peru under garcia these experiences are described in detail not as a righteous assertion of conservative economics but as a warning that populist policies ultimately fail and always at a frightening cost to the groups they were supposed to benefit this paper explores the question of whether some variant of populist policies could succeed it suggests that populist policies could succeed if they stayed clear of foreign exchange constraints emphasized reactivation for a brief initial period and then shifted to growth policies most important expansionary policies must reflect awareness of capacity constraints and must rely for financing on an extremely orthodox fiscal policy and rigorous tax adminsitration the paper concludes by warning that imf style policies unconcerned with growth of social progress may establish financial stability in the short run but inevitably open the door to yet another round of destructive reaction in the form of populist policies

what drives the swing voter in africa what makes african voters up for grabs existing approaches to the swing voter have several liabilities this article introduces a new measure enabling a more comprehensive assessment of swing voting including the differentiation between clientelistic and collective goods motivations the issue of swing voting is then brought to an environment where voters are rarely considered persuadable africa using a count model estimation technique and original survey data from ghana s critical 2008 elections the analysis challenges the near consensus in african politics on clientelism as the only electoral strategy when voters perceive politicians as providing collective developmental goods the efficacy of clientelism as a tool to win over voters is reduced many persuadable voters can also be won over by both clientelistic and collective goods thus contradicting the literature presenting these as mutually exclusive finally the analysis shows that incumbents do better when they provide collective goods even in highly clientelistic environments

does delegation of fiscal policy to an independent agency make a difference evidence from intergovernmental transfers in india abstract one area of fiscal policy in which several countries have delegated responsibility to an independent agency is the distribution of national resource transfers across regional and local governments such delegation is expected to promote equity and efficiency and mitigate distortions created by political incentives this paper tests whether delegation to an independent agency indeed makes a difference by contrasting the impact of partisan politics on two types of fiscal transfers to states in the indian federation over a period of time 1972 1995 the pattern of evidence shows that while the transfers that are determined by the central political executive are indeed distributed to favor particular states that are politically important for the central ruling party the transfers that are delegated to an independent agency serve to constrain such partisan impact

constitutional rules and fiscal policy outcomes we investigate the effect of electoral rules and forms of government on fiscal policy outcomes in a large sample of democracies we rely on different estimation methods to address prospective problems of statistical inference due to non random selection of these constitutional rules the findings are consistent with our theoretical priors presidential regimes induce smaller governments than parliamentary democracies while majoritarian elections lead to smaller governments and smaller welfare programs than proportional elections

reapportionment and redistribution consequences of electoral reform in japan does reapportionment in a legislature affect policy outcomes we examine this question from a comparative perspective by focusing on reapportionment associated with the electoral reform in japan first we show that the reform of 1994 resulted in an unprecedented degree of equalization in legislative representation second using municipal level data we present evidence that municipalities in overrepresented districts received significantly more subsidies per capita as compared to those in underrepresented districts in both prereform and postreform years third by examining the relationship between the change in the number of seats per capita and the change in the amount of subsidies per capita at the municipal level we show that the equalization in voting strength resulted in an equalization of total transfers per person

balanced budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition this paper models balanced budget redistribution between socio economic groups as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties equilibrium is unique in the present model and a sufficient condition for existence is given requiring that there be enough stochastic heterogeneity with respect to party preferences in the electorate the validity of hotelling s principle of minimum differentiation and of director s law are examined under alternative hypotheses concerning administrative costs of redistributions and voter s possibilities both of abstaining from voting and of becoming campaign activists for one of the parties the policy strategy of expected plurality maximization is contrasted with the strategy of maximizing the probability of gaining a plurality incomes are fixed and known so lump sum taxation is feasible however constraints on tax transfer differentiation between individuals are permitted in the analysis

distributive politics and the allocation of federal grants understanding the dynamics of policy distribution requires an appreciation of federal grant programs that have achieved a prominent place in nearly all areas of domestic policy the theoretical literature on distributive politics however focuses almost exclusively on a centralized top down view of policy distribution by examining the role of presidents legislators and bureaucrats scholars have ignored participants who have become key actors in the distribution of federal expenditures the recipient jurisdictions this analysis of the allocation patterns under six federal programs shows that local governments exert important influences on the distribution of federal grants and that the distributional patterns and their determinants vary over time the analysis also points out the importance of disaggregation by focusing on programs and recipient jurisdictions as opposed to total federal expenditures and regions states or congressional districts

constitutions and economic policy at the rare moments in history when a nation debates constitutional reform the key issues often concern how the reforms might affect economic policy and economic performance for example italy abandoned a system of pure proportional representation where legislators were elected according to the proportions of the popular national vote received by their parties and moved toward including ingredients of plurality rule where legislators are elected in each district according to who receives the highest number of votes key italian political leaders are now considering proposals to introduce elements of presidentialism where the head of government is elected by direct popular vote rather than the current parliamentary regime a common argument in italy was that the electoral reform would help stifle political corruption and reduce the propensity of italian governments to run budget deficits in the 1990s constitutional reforms have been debated and implemented in a number of other countries too for instance new zealand moved away from a pure system of plurality rule in single member districts to a system mixing elements of proportional representation japan also renounced its special form of plurality rule the so called single nontransferable vote in favor of a system that mixes elements of proportional and plurality representation similar proposals have been debated in the united kingdom in latin america questions have been raised as to whether the poor and volatile economic performance of many countries can be traced to their presidential form of government

the structural adjustment of politics in africa abstract it has long been recognized that the structural adjustment programs currently being proposed by the world bank and the international monetary fund in africa have important political consequences however there has been almost no attention devoted to what structural adjustment if implemented means for the way that politics is actually carried out in african nations the failure to examine the long term consequences of economic reform for politics is particularly surprising given that the major instruments of structural adjustment public sector reform devaluation elimination of marketing boards threaten to change not only the constituencies that african leaders look to for support but the way in which leaders relate to their supporters in the countries south of the sahara the paper examines how structural adjustment if actually implemented would affect politics in african countries the paper finds that structural adjustment makes the political climate much riskier for leaders while weakening the central apparatus of the state on which rulers have long relied to stay in power the implications of the analysis for donors are also discussed

preferential resource spending under an employment guarantee the political economy of mgnregs in andhra pradesh are ostensibly demand driven public works programs with high levels of safeguards nonetheless susceptible to political influence this conjecture is investigated using expenditure data at the local level from india s national rural employment guarantee scheme focusing on one state where accountability and transparency mechanisms have been employed and implementation efforts have been widely applauded there is no evidence of partisan influenced spending before the 2009 election however a statistically significant but small in magnitude effect after the 2009 election most variation in public works expenditures is explained by the observed needs of potential beneficiaries as the scheme intended

equilibrium political budget cycles political business cycle theories generally rely on nominal rigidities and voter myopia this paper offers an equilibrium theory that preserves some basic insights from earlier models though with significant refinements the political budget cycle emphasized here is in fiscal policy rather than output and inflation it arises via a multidimensional signal process one can consider the welfare implications of proposals to mitigate the cycle and the effects of altering the electoral structure copyright 1990 by american economic association

local inequality and project choice theory and evidence from ecuador this paper provides evidence consistent with elite capture of social fund investment projects in ecuador exploiting a unique combination of data sets on village level income distributions social fund project administration and province level electoral results we test a simple model of project choice when local political power is unequally distributed in accordance with the predictions of the model poorer villages are more likely to receive projects that provide excludable private goods to the poor such as latrines controlling for poverty more unequal communities are less likely to receive such projects consistent with the hypothesis of elite capture these results are sensitive to the specific measures of inequality and elite power used in the empirical analysis and are strongest for expenditure shares at the top of the distribution

two moment decision models and expected utility maximization two moment decision models are consistent with expected utility maximization only if the choice set or the agent s preferences are restricted this paper identifies a restriction which is sufficient to ensure this consistency and confirms that it holds in many economic models the implications for economic analysis are then derived two different approaches to representing an agent s preferences over strategies yielding random payoffs are in wide use under the mean standard deviation ms approach the agent is assumed to rank the alternatives according to the value of some function defined over the first two moments of the random payoff while the expected utility eu criterion assumes that the expected value of some utility function defined over payoffs is used instead the fact that there are these two competing approaches has generated a considerable literature some authors are concerned with the advantages and disadvantages of each while others deal with conditions under which the potentially different approaches would yield the same results or at least approximately so space does not

the politics of federalism in argentina and its implications for governance and accountability summary this paper contributes to an agenda that views the effects of federalism and decentralization as dependent on the incentives of national and subnational political actors it studies the mechanisms by which subnational actors affect decisions at the central level in the context of a highly decentralized middle income democracy argentina in this federal country provincial actors and concerns weigh heavily on national decisions most argentine provinces are dominated by entrenched elites with limited political competition weak division of powers and clientelistic political linkages provincial dominance and national relevance reinforce each other dragging argentine politics toward the practices and features of its most background regions

econometric estimation of producers risk attitudes general methods are proposed for the identification and econometric estimation of the parameters of the distribution of risk attitudes in a producer population the proposed methods also provide the basis for the development of statistical tests of model specification and of behavioral hypotheses econometric risk attitude estimation is shown to be possible under less restrictive conditions than previously believed a moment based version of the general model is applied to indian data and the econometrically estimated risk attitudes are presented and compared to experimental results for a similar group of producers

are rules based government programs shielded from special interest politics evidence from revenue sharing transfers in brazil abstract manipulation of government finances for the benefit of narrowly defined groups is usually thought to be limited to the part of the budget over which politicians exercise discretion in the short run such as earmarks analyzing a revenue sharing program between the central and local governments in brazil that uses an allocation formula based on local population estimates i document two main results first that the population estimates entering the formula were manipulated and second that this manipulation was political in nature consistent with swing voter targeting by the right wing central government i find that municipalities with roughly equal right wing and non right wing vote shares benefited relative to opposition or conservative core support municipalities these findings suggest that the exclusive focus on discretionary transfers in the extant empirical literature on special interest politics may understate the true scope of tactical redistribution that is going on under programmatic disguise

public opinion and market reforms the limits of economic voting the broadly held view that promarket reforms are good for most people is in conflict with the equally broadly held view that in democracies reforms will generate widespread resistance resistance is expected because reforms typically produce economic downturns at least over the short term under normal circumstances we expect citizens to withdraw support from governments during periods of economic decline if citizens withdraw support then governments worried about the next election may abandon reforms but our expectations should be different of new democracies pursuing promarket reforms citizens may believe governments when they claim that things have to get worse before they get better or that economic stagnation is the fault of the past model research in poland peru and mexico reported in this special issue supports these expectations hence under democracy there is more scope for support of painful reforms than frequently acknowledged

does political competition lessen ethnic discrimination evidence from sri lanka abstract the impact of political competition on ethnic discrimination remains largely unexplored to address this gap this paper explores the relationship between the level of political competition and the probability of receiving government transfers among ethnic minorities in sri lanka in the run up to the national elections of 2000 the paper shows that making politicians dependent on the votes of members of ethnic groups other their own can encourage moderation in discriminatory practices towards ethnic minorities specifically we find that political competition positively influenced the distribution of government food stamps among sri lankan tamils who otherwise are less likely to receive food stamps relative to the sinhalese majority the negative impact of political competition on discrimination is higher when minorities form part of swing constituencies than when they form part of the base support for political parties lessons learnt here suggest that having built in incentives in the design of the electoral process for intergroup bargaining and cooperation in countries with ethnically heterogeneous societies can be an effective restraint on ethnic discrimination this is consistent with other research that considers political institutions to be a key lever for making ethnically divided societies more inclusive

the allocation and impact of social funds between 1992 and 1998 the peruvian social fund foncodes spent about us 570 million funding microprojects throughout the country many of these projects involved constructing and renovating school

voter buying shaping the electorate through clientelism studies of clientelism typically assume that political machines distribute rewards to persuade or mobilize the existing electorate we argue that rewards not only influence actions of the electorate but can also shape its composition across the world machines employ voter buying to import outsiders into their districts voter buying demonstrates how clientelism can underpin electoral fraud and it offers an explanation of why machines deliver rewards when they cannot monitor vote choices our analyses suggest that voter buying dramatically influences municipal elections in brazil a regression discontinuity design suggests that voter audits which undermined voter buying decreased the electorate by 12 percentage points and reduced the likelihood of mayoral reelection by 18 percentage points consistent with voter buying these effects are significantly greater in municipalities with large voter inflows and where neighboring municipalities had large voter outflows findings are robust to an alternative research design using a different data set

inequality social insurance and redistribution is the political support for welfare policy higher or lower in less egalitarian societies we answer the question using a model of welfare policy as publicly financed insurance that pays benefits in a redistributive manner when voters have both redistributive and insurance motives for supporting welfare spending the effect of inequality depends on how benefits are targeted greater inequality increases support for welfare expenditures when benefits are targeted to the employed but decreases support when benefits are targeted to those without earnings with endogenous targeting support for benefits to those without earnings declines as inequality increases whereas support for aggregate spending is a v shaped function of inequality statistical analysis of welfare expenditures in advanced industrial societies provides support for key empirical implications of the model

distributive politics and regional development assessing the territorial distribution of turkey s public investment turkey is often perceived as a country with low bureaucratic capacity and prone to political manipulation and pork barrel this article tests whether this is the case by analysing the extent to which politics rather than equity and efficiency criteria have determined the geographical allocation of public investment across the 81 provinces of turkey between 2005 and 2012 the results show that although the turkish government has indeed channelled public expenditures to reward its core constituencies socioeconomic factors remained the most relevant predictors of investment moreover in contrast to official regional development policy principles we uncover the concentration of public investment in areas with comparatively higher levels of development we interpret this as the state bureaucracy s intentional strategy of focussing on efficiency by concentrating resources on the better off among the most in need

real time pricing with ramping costs a new approach to managing a steep change in electricity demand in many countries electricity demand increases very steeply during the morning hours and decreases steeply during the evening hours a steep change in electricity demand incurs considerable costs for ramping up and down electric power equipment and raises the possibility of a large scale blackout this paper gives new insights into classical real time pricing rtp by considering the case in which demand changes very steeply we generalize the concept of the ramping costs and derive an extended form of rtp that achieves the optimal rate of change in quantity demanded by explicitly taking the ramping costs into account under the optimal pricing policy the prices are dramatically reduced during the period corresponding to the lower end of the slope of the load curve in contrast the prices are dramatically raised during the period corresponding to the upper end of the slope of the load curve as a result the steepness of the load curve will be remarkably controlled which will reduce both the ramping costs and the possibility of a large scale blackout

ideology tactics and efficiency in redistributive politics we model the electoral politics of redistribution when voters and parties care about inequality in addition to their private concerns for consumption and votes respectively ideological concerns about income redistribution lead each party to adopt a general proportional income tax adjusted to appeal to the ideological leanings of high clout groups with disproportionately many swing voters which the parties also ply with pork barrel projects our results relate to director s law which says that redistributive politics favors middle classes at the expense of both rich and poor

incorporating marginal citizens and voters the conditional electoral effects of targeted social assistance in latin america in this article we study how social assistance shapes election results across latin america case studies in several countries have found electoral effects yet it remains unclear whether and how effects vary cross nationally and whether electoral effects are due to mobilization or persuasion we theorize that programs mobilize non voters and convert the opposition simultaneously but that the effects vary based on country level political and programmatic differences using 2012 americasbarometer data we develop a unified cross national model that confirms that public assistance makes recipients more likely to turn out and once at the polls to vote for the incumbent compulsory voting laws and program politicization magnify the electoral effects of social assistance but effects do not vary by presidential ideology or program conditionalities these findings are consistent with the perspective that latin american voters are boundedly rational retrospective agents whose behavioral choices depend on t

the effect of wind and solar power forecasts on day ahead and intraday electricity prices in germany abstract this study analyzes the effects of wind and solar power generation forecasts on electricity prices converse to the existing empirical literature in this area we apply a panel data analysis to control for endogeneity due to unobserved heterogeneity we use a dataset with 24 daily observations of day ahead and intraday prices from 2010 to 2016 and we apply a fixed effects regression under consideration of robust driscoll kraay standard errors a noteworthy element of the regression model is the simulation based design of a variable indicating the power generation technology that is price determining at a certain point in time in this context we differentiate between the fuel types coal gas and others to model the nonlinear price behavior for a varying demand for 2016 we find price dampening effects of both wind and solar power of approximately 0 6 mwh per additional gwh of feed in along with the rapidly increasing shares of wind and solar power of the total power generation during the last years their price dampening effect has declined since 2013 due to a drop in fuel prices another finding is that a reduction in forecasting errors on the power generation from wind and solar and smoothing of the cyclical demand would lead to a decreased price volatility

distributive politics and conditional cash transfers the case of brazil s bolsa familia summary brazilian politicians have long relied on pork and clientelism to win political support and recent literature suggests that little has changed however researchers have yet to systematically investigate whether political criteria influence the distribution of funds through bolsa familia this is especially surprising given the program s prominence in the international community in this paper i examine whether political criteria explain the federal government s distribution of bolsa familia i find little evidence that political criteria explain the difference between the number of poor families that live in a municipality and the number of families that receive support i conclude by discussing the broader significance of this large programmatic policy to brazil s political development

optimal leverage for the utility maximizing firm abstract this paper investigates the behavior of a utility maximizing firm which chooses both its financial structure and its technique of production risk attitudes affect the production choice only indirectly risk aversion shifts the demand curve for credit this demand shift affects the marginal interest rate faced by the firm and through the interest rate there is an effect on production interaction of credit supply and demand schedules may segment the population into groups with very different responses to risk or credit market policy interventions

the road to power partisan loyalty and the centralized provision of local infrastructure this paper sets out a simple dynamic probabilistic voting model in which a government allocates a fixed budget across electoral districts that differ in their loyalties to the ruling party the model predicts that the geographic pattern of spending depends on the way the government balances long run machine politics considerations and the more immediate concern to win over swing voters empirical results obtained from a panel of electoral districts in quebec provide robust evidence that districts which display loyalty to the incumbent government receive disproportionately more spending especially close to an election at odds with the standard swing voter view

merit tenure and bureaucratic behavior evidence from a conjoint experiment in the dominican republic bureaucratic behavior in developing countries remains poorly understood why do some public servants yet not others work hard to deliver public services misuse state resources and or participate in electoral mobilization a classic answer comes from weber bureaucratic structures shift behavior toward integrity neutrality and commitment to public service our study conducts the first survey experimental test of the effects of bureaucratic structures it does so through a conjoint experiment with public servants in the dominican republic looking at merit examinations and job stability we find that weber was right but only partially recruitment by examination curbs corruption and political services by bureaucrats while enhancing work motivation job stability by contrast only decreases political services tenured bureaucrats are less likely to participate in electoral mobilization examinations thus enhance the quality of bureaucracy motivation and lower corruption and democracy electoral compe

who delivers partisan clients in the argentine electoral market why do some parties fail to benefit from patronage in pork ridden political systems this article analyzes the interaction between patronage and partisanship to explain why some incumbents are more likely to benefit from pork politics than others we explain such differences by focusing on political parties access to resources supply side and voters dependence on fiscal largesse demand side we show how these differences affect the patron s choice of public sector wages and employment we use subnational level data to show different electoral returns from patronage for the two major political coalitions in argentina peronism and the ucr alianza and their effect on preferences over public sector wages and employment w hy do some political parties fail to benefit from patronage in pork ridden political systems this article analyzes the interaction between patronage and partisanship to explain why some incumbents are more likely to benefit from pork politics than others we explain returns to patronage by highlighting differences in the political parties access to resources supply side and the voter s dependence on public sector jobs demand side we propose that just as political parties cater their policies to particular groups of voters they pursue different strategies when allocating pork in exchange for support on the supply side we highlight the importance of partisan biases in the fiscal and electoral institutions that regulate the access and distribution of public resources on the demand side we show that patronage is a distributive mechanism that provides different returns to voters with different skills and labor market expectations

the political economy of fertilizer subsidy programs in africa evidence from zambia fertilizer subsidy programs have re emerged as popular policy tools in sub saharan africa despite a burgeoning body of literature on program impacts the political economy of the programs remains poorly understood in particular there is a dearth of empirical evidence to support or refute the conventional wisdoms that governments systematically target subsidized inputs to certain areas based on past voting patterns and that fertilizer subsidies win votes this article discusses the theoretical links between government targeting of subsidized fertilizer and voter behavior then uses panel data from zambia to empirically test these conventional wisdoms results suggest that zambia s movement for multi party democracy governments targeted more subsidized fertilizer to households in areas where it had strong support in the previous presidential election however contrary to conventional wisdom marginal changes in the scale or coverage of the fertilizer subsidy program had no statistically significant effect on the share or number of votes won by incumbent presidents

distributive politics in a multiparty system the conditional cash transfer program in turkey what are the dynamics of distributive politics in a setting of multiparty competition existing studies on the allocation of resources across multiple electoral districts focus primarily on a setting of two party competition and consider only the core versus swing district hypotheses this framework does not correspond to the actual electoral setting in many countries and ignores valuable information furnished by a context of multiparty competition compared with two party elections multiparty elections provide more information about the underlying distribution of the ideological preferences of voters in a district this information could be utilized by the incumbent party to maximize electoral returns in this article i argue that a setting of multiparty competition presents incentives to the incumbent party to channel disproportionately more resources to districts with an ideologically close challenger systematic evidence from the conditional cash transfer program spending in 878 districts of turkey

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

the subnational politics of economic adjustment provincial politics and fiscal performance in argentina existing research has failed to address the impact of subnational politics on economic adjustment this article attempts to fill this gap by outlining theoretical reasons for anticipating policy divergences across levels of government and by offering three hypotheses to account for variation at the subnational level the authors explore these ideas on the basis of the argentine experience the study traces the impact of subnational policy on argentine economic adjustment and tests hypotheses about subnational policy variation on the basis of provincial fiscal data the authors findings underline the importance of subnational policy choice for national performance and suggest a revised understanding of the role of political competition in the economic adjustment process the authors find considerable evidence that interactions between party competition and the structure of the public sector shape provincial fiscal performance and thereby condition the capacity for economic adjustment at the national level

brand dilution and the breakdown of political parties in latin america why would a national political party that has been competitive for decades collapse overnight in recent years parties across latin america went from being major contenders for executive office to electoral irrelevance over the course of a single electoral cycle the author develops an explanation that highlights the impact of elite actions on voter behavior during the 1980s and 1990s leaders across the region implemented policies that were inconsistent with their traditional party brand provoked internal party conflicts and formed strange bedfellow alliances with traditional rivals these actions diluted the brands of their parties eroding voters partisan attachments without the assured support of partisans parties become more susceptible to retrospective voting voters who now had no party attachments deserted incumbent parties when they performed poorly the author tests this interactive hypothesis using matched comparisons of six party election cases from argentina and venezuela

the regressive demands of demand driven development despite their explicit focus on reaching the poor many community driven development cdd projects have been found to be only mildly pro poor in their funding allocations this paper presents evidence of an explanation that has been overlooked in the cdd literature to date the requirement that beneficiaries must apply for projects in order to receive support the authors first examine data on the universe of project applications and funding under tanzania s flagship cdd program tanzania s social action fund and then use a census of 100 program villages to examine the determinants of both program awareness and program participation at the household level the data paint a consistent picture at both levels wealth access to information and political capital are important correlates of the ability to navigate the application process successfully the centrally dictated features of this decentralized program appear to be the most effective mechanisms in directing funds to the poor the results suggest that unless demand driven projects can develop ways of soliciting engagement from a broader cross section of the population they are unlikely to achieve truly progressive targeting

government subsidies and presidential election outcomes evidence for a developing country summary we explore the effects of government subsidies on presidential elections in chile in 1989 99 we use a panel with three periods the elections of 1989 1993 and 1999 and 229 counties we correct for the potential simultaneity problem deriving from the fact that an incumbent facing a difficult political scenario might react by increasing subsidies to improve his her electoral performance our results indicate that the greater the coverage of these types of programs i e the percentage of people receiving subsidies the higher the votes for the incumbent

electoral institutions and the politics of coalitions why some democracies redistribute more than others standard political economy models of redistribution notably that of meltzer and richard 1981 fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies we develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone to redistribute than others we show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the nature of political parties and the composition of governing coalitions hence redistribution our argument implies 1 that center left governments dominate under pr systems whereas center right governments dominate under majoritarian systems and 2 that pr systems redistribute more than majoritarian systems we test our argument on panel data for redistribution government partisanship and electoral system in advanced democracies w hy do some countries redistribute more than others most work on the politics of redistribution starts from the premise that democratic institutions empower those who stand to benefit from redistribution the basic logic is succinctly captured in the meltzer richard 1981 model where the voter with the median income is also the decisive voter with a typical right skewed distribution of income the median voter will push for redistributive spending up to the point where the benefit of such spending to the median voter is outweighed by the efficiency costs of distortionary taxation this argument implies that redistibution is much greater in democracies than in nondemocracies at least of the right authoritarian variety and that among the latter inegalitarian societies redistribute more than egalitarian ones there is some evidence to supportthefirstimplication althoughitisdisputed see ross 2005 but most of the variance in redistribution is probably within the same regime type according to datafromtheluxembourgincomestudy forexample the reduction in the poverty rate in united states as a result of taxation and transfers was 13 in 1994 whereas the comparable figure for sweden was 82 thepovertyrateisthepercentageofhouseholdsbelow 50 of the median income to explain this variance we have to look at political and economic differences

the populist road to market reform policy and electoral coalitions in mexico and argentina governing parties face two fundamental tasks they must pursue policies effectively and they must win elections their national coalitions therefore generally include two types of constituencies those that are important for policy making and those that make it possible to win elections in effect governing parties must bring together a policy coalition and an electoral coalition this distinction sheds light on how the transitional costs of major economic policy shifts can be made sustainable in electoral terms it also provides a starting point for analysis of how two of latin america s most important labor based parties the peronist party in argentina and the partido revolucionario institucional pri in mexico maintained electoral dominance while pursuing free market reforms that adversely affected key social constituencies peronism and the pri are conceived of as having encompassed historically two distinctive and regionally based subcoalitions a metropolitan coalition that gave support to the parties development strategies and a peripheral coalition that carried the burden of generating electoral majorities this framework permits a reconceptualization of the historic coalitional dynamics of peronism and the pri and sheds light on the current process of coalitional change and economic reform

demand customer base line and demand response in the electricity market a survey the increasing use of demand side management as a tool to reliably meet electricity demands at peak time has stimulated interest among researchers consumers and producer organiza tions managers regulators and policymakers this research reviews the growing literature on models which are used to study demand customer base line cbl and demand response in the electricity market after characterizing the general demand models the cbl based on which the demand response models are studied is reviewed given the experience gained from the review and existing conditions the study combines an appropriate model for each case for a possible application to the electricity market moreover it discusses the implications of the results in the literature these aspects are studied independently the main contribution of this survey is attributed to the treatment of the three issues as sequentially interdependent the review is expected to enhance the understanding of the demand cbl and demand response in the electricity market and their relationships the objective is conducted through a combination of demand and supply side managements in order to reduce demand through different demand response programs during peak times this enables electricity suppliers to save costly electricity generation and at the same time reduce energy vulnerability