witchcraft beliefs as a cultural legacy of the atlantic slave trade evidence from two continents abstract this paper argues that the historical slave trade contributed to the propagation of persistent witchcraft beliefs on both sides of the atlantic ocean and establishes two key empirical patterns first it shows that in sub saharan africa representatives of ethnic groups which were more heavily exposed to the atlantic slave trade in the past are more likely to believe in witchcraft today thus establishing a link between historical trauma and contemporary culture second exploring the role of the slave trade in cultural transmission across continents this paper finds that afro descendants in modern latin america are substantially more likely to believe in witchcraft relative to other ancestral groups moreover accounting for ancestry and other relevant factors people residing in regions historically more reliant on african slave labor are also more likely to be witchcraft believers these findings support ethnographic narratives on the connection between slave trade slavery and the entrenchment of witchcraft beliefs and shed light on the nature of these beliefs and related practices as a cultural framework for interpreting misfortune and a mechanism of enslavement in local communities

political budget cycles with informed voters evidence from italy i exploit a reform that required italian municipalities to disclose their balance sheetsbefore elections to study whether having more informed voters aects the political budgetcycle to start inve

god insures those who pay formal insurance and religious offerings in ghana this article provides experimental support for the hypothesis that insurance can be a motive for religious donations we randomize enrollment of members of a pentecostal church in ghana into a commercial funeral insurance policy then church members allocate money between themselves and a set of religious goods in a series of dictator games with significant stakes members enrolled in insurance give significantly less money to their own church compared with members who only receive information about the insurance enrollment also reduces giving toward other spiritual goods we set up a model exploring different channels of religiously based insurance the implications of the model and the results from the dictator games suggest that adherents perceive the church as a source of insurance and that this insurance is derived from beliefs in an interventionist god survey results suggest that material insurance from the church community is also important and we hypothesize that these two insurance channels exist in parallel

unemployment and the democratic electoral advantage this article calls into question the conventional wisdom that incumbent parties are rewarded when unemployment is low and punished when it is high using county level data on unemployment and election returns for 175 midterm gubernatorial elections and 4 presidential elections from 1994 to 2010 the analysis finds that unemployment and the democratic vote for president and governor move together other things being equal higher unemployment increases the vote shares of democratic candidates the effect is greatest when republicans are the incumbent party but democrats benefit from unemployment even when they are in control the explanation for these findings is that unemployment is a partisan issue for voters not a valence issue and that the democratic party owns unemployment when unemployment is high or rising democratic candidates can successfully convince voters that they are the party best able to solve the problem

a model of political equilibrium in a representative democracy abstract this paper studies political equilibrium in a two party representative democracy in which the political parties are policy motivated and voters trade off their policy preferences against their party identity it is shown that the parties will in general adopt differing policy positions in equilibrium and that under certain qualifications the winning policy will lie between the more popular party s preferred policy and a certain utilitarian optimum the winning policy will be closer to this utilitarian optimum the less biased the electorate is in terms of party identification

do conditional cash transfers affect electoral behavior evidence from a randomized experiment in mexico this article reexamines the argument that targeted programs increase pro incumbent voting by persuading beneficiaries to cast ballots against their first partisan choice the evidence comes from the randomized component of progresa the pioneering mexican conditional cash transfer cct program experimental data show that early enrollment in the program led to substantive increases in voter turnout and in the incumbent s vote share in the 2000 presidential election the experiment also reveals that opposition parties vote shares were unaffected by the program thus the electoral bonus generated by ccts may be best explained by a mobilizing rather than persuasive mechanism these findings are difficult to reconcile with the notion that the electoral effects of ccts are a result of prospective concerns triggered by threats of program discontinuation or endogenous program enrollment instead the evidence in this article suggests that ccts mobilizing effects are compatible with programmatic politics

political preferences for the pork barrel a generalization this paper provides a rational explanation for the observation of oversized coalitions often approaching unanimous size in the realm of distributive policies distributive policies are those which concentrate benefits in specific geographic areas states congressional districts while spreading costs through general taxation the explanation offered here that legislators may rationally prefer universalism to hard ball coalition politics generalizes earlier work of weingast and fiorina in particular it extends their results to pork barrel politics i e projects that are economically inefficient and demonstrates how packages of economically inefficient projects can nevertheless be politically popular the main theoretical feature that induces preferences for universalism is uncertainty over the composition of winning coalitions and consequently the desire for the political insurance that universalism provides

a theory of divided government this paper extends the spatial theory of voting to an institutional structure in which policy choices depend upon not only the executive but also the composition of the legislature voters have incentives to be strategic since policy reflects the outcome of a simultaneous election of the legislature and the executive and since the legislature s impact on policy depends upon relative plurality to analyze equilibrium in this game between voters we apply coalition proof type refinements the model has several testable implications which are consistent with voting behavior in the united states for instance the model predicts a split tickets where some voters vote for one party for president and the other for congress b for some parameter values a divided government with different parties controlling the executive and the majority of the legislature and c the midterm electoral cycle with the party holding the presidency always losing votes in midterm congressional elections

bringing home the bacon an empirical analysis of the extent and effects of pork barreling in australian politics which electorates receive targeted funding and does targeted funding swing votes to answer these questions i analyze four discretionary programs funded by the australian federal government during the 2001 2004 election cycle controlling for relevant demographic characteristics of the electorate those electorates held by the governing coalition received a larger share of discretionary funding and a larger number of program grants among government seats funding does not appear to have been directed towards those that were more marginal more discretionary funding particularly on road building was associated with a larger swing towards the government in the 2004 election

gold monetization and gold discipline gold and its price have emerged as frequent topics of both academic and government debate 2 public attention focused on the gold market since gold s price began fluctuating violently in 1980 and 1981 has turned to gold as a possible means of removing some discretion inherent in the current fiat money system since lack of adherence to monetary rules can lead to problems of dynamic policy inconsistency academic economists have begun seriously to reconsider monetary standards based either on gold or on some other commodity as politically feasible methods of establishing rules 3

the effects of discretionary federal spending on parliamentary election results i introduction three compelling reasons to expect that discretionary federal spending will have a different impact on incumbent majority and opposition candidates in the canadian parliamentary system of government are only the prime minister and his appointed cabinet may propose spending or taxing initiatives the electorate only votes directly for their local member of parliament mp and if the prime minister declares a vote of confidence all majority party mps must vote with the prime minister or leave the party these three characteristics combined with the fact that the opposition does not have enough votes to successfully prevent passage of legislation make it very difficult for opposition mps to influence discretionary spending if the electorate is aware of this situation majority party candidates regardless of incumbency stand to reap the electoral benefits of additional federal discretionary spending furthermore opposition incumbents will lose votes as a consequence if majority candidates receive additional votes to some extent this must be at the expense of votes for opposition incumbents the purpose of this paper is to empirically test these two hypothesis the idea that discretionary spending can be used to influence election outcomes verges on the trite mass media discussions are rife with accusations of pork barrel politics this idea is implicitly contained the entire interest group theory of political decision making and it is formally modeled in papers such as weingast shepsle and johnsen 1981 despite the general agreement on the electoral motivations of discretionary spending empirical findings have been relatively unsuccessful in documenting either important or significant effects of discretionary spending or various other district level explanatory variables typical of this literature jacobson 1978 finds a negative and small effect of incumbent campaign spending and johannes and mcadams 1981 find no effect of case work on election outcomes as explained by fiorina 1981 rivers and fiorina 1989 and stein and bickers 1994 the presence of a simultaneous equation system has biased the empirical estimates since politicians are apt to shift resources towards those electoral districts where the election is expected to be closest ordinary least squares will underestimate the true effect stein and bickers demonstrate a negative correlation between the closeness of elections and the amount of pork barrel spending in congressional races in a more recent article case 2001 finds that federal block grants are negatively influenced by the expected closeness of the election in albania despite the recognition of a simultaneity bias attempts to overcome the problem have generally been unsuccessful a notable exception is that of levitt and snyder 1997 who uses spending outside of a district but inside a state as an instrument for spending in the district levitt and snyder find a positive and significant impact of discretionary spending on the share of the vote for incumbents in u s house elections this paper contributes to the discretionary spending and election literature in two ways using a newly created data set of canadian federal spending at the electoral district level the analysis of discretionary spending can be extended beyond the u s border and presidential system of government to a parliamentary system additionally the results contained herein provide a robustness check of levitt and snyder s methodology using instruments similar to those proposed by nagler and leighley 1992 and levitt and snyder 1997 consistent estimates indicate that increases in federal government spending and national gross domestic product gdp per capita have positive and significant effects on the share of the vote received by majority incumbents yet insignificant effects on opposition incumbents the sign of the point estimates are negative

the new open economy macroeconomics a survey since the 1995 publication of obsteld and rogoff s redux model there has been an outpouring of research on open economy dynamic general equilibrium models that incorporate imperfect competition and nominal rigidities this paper offers an interim survey of this recent literature 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

election results and opportunistic policies a new test of the rational political business cycle model the literature on the rational pbc suggests that politicians systematically manipulate economic and fiscal conditions before elections to increase their chances of reelection most tests of this theory look for evidence of pre election distortions in fiscal policy we propose a new test that explores the two way interaction between the magnitude of the opportunistic distortion and the margin of victory the test is implemented using a large panel of portuguese municipalities the results show that opportunism leads to a larger win margin for the incumbent and that incumbents behave more opportunistically when their win margin is small these results are consistent with the theoretical model

excess capacity monopolistic competition and international transmission of monetary disturbances analyzes the excess capacity monopolistic competition and international transmission of monetary policy disturbances in the united states sheds light on the international impact of monetary policy emphasis on the spillover effects of monetary disturbances similarity of framework used with open economy macroeconomics

seeing the forest through the trees a meta analysis of political budget cycles despite a vast number of articles the political budget cycle literature contains many conflicting theories and empirical results i conduct the first ever meta analysis of this literature in order to establish whether a link between elections and government budgets exists using data on 1198 estimates across 88 studies published between 2000 and 2015 i find evidence of a statistically significant yet substantively small increase in government expenditures and public debt around elections and reductions in revenues and fiscal balance using meta regression analysis combined with bayesian model averaging i find support for some of the context conditional theories in the literature although the findings of political budget cycles are robust to publication bias as well as some of the methodological and study specific choices authors are forced to make they also shed light on how certain decisions may affect a study s findings this has implications for current and future research on political budget cycles

collapsing exchange rate regimes some linear examples abstract we construct a pair of linear examples to study the collapse time of a fixed exchange rate regime the first example is a perfect foresight continuous time model which allows calculation of the exact collapse time and the tracking of reserves the second example is a discrete time stochastic model which yields an endogenous probability distribution over the collapse time and produces a forward discount of the exchange rate

why being wrong can be right magical warfare technologies and the persistence of false beliefs across human societies one sees many examples of deeply rooted and widely held beliefs that are almost certainly untrue examples include beliefs about witchcraft magic ordeals and superstitions why are such incorrect beliefs so prevalent and how do they persist we consider this question through an examination of superstitions and magic associated with conflict in the eastern democratic republic of the congo focusing on superstitions related to bulletproofing we provide theory and case study evidence showing how these incorrect beliefs persist although harmful at the individual level we show that they generate pareto efficient outcomes that have group level benefits

electoral manipulation via voter friendly spending theory and evidence abstract we present a model of the political budget cycle in which incumbents try to influence voters by changing the composition of government spending rather than overall spending or revenues rational voters may support an incumbent who targets them with spending before the election even though such spending may be due to opportunistic manipulation because it may also reflect sincere preference of the incumbent for types of spending voters favor classifying expenditures into those which are likely targeted to voters and those that are not we provide evidence supporting our model in data on local public finances for all colombian municipalities our findings indicate both a pre electoral increase in targeted expenditures combined with a contraction of other types of expenditure and a voter response to targeting

economic conditions and incumbent support in africa s new democracies evidence from zambia in this article the authors investigate the effects of economic conditions on support for an incumbent regime in a new african democracy drawing on two unique data sources from zambia the results of a 1 200 respondent postelection survey and a pair of 10 000 household poverty surveys conducted in the same years as that country s first two posttransition general elections the authors find evidence that declining economic conditions coincide with the withdrawal of support for the incumbent president although the effects of changing economic conditions are relatively small compared to noneconomic determinants of the vote such as ethnic affiliation and urban rural location the authors also find that to the extent that voters respond to declining economic conditions they do so via withdrawal from the electoral process rather than via support for the opposition the findings suggest that african electorates are at least modestly responsive to economic trends but that noneconomic motivations still predomin

the price of pork the seniority trap in the u s house abstract using data on federal outlays and u s house elections i estimate the effect of the pork barrel on the quality of officeholders taking into account the fact that seniority creates a dynamic linkage across periods after estimating the parameters governing the influence of seniority on federal outlays and the parameters governing the distributions of candidate quality i conduct several policy experiments to uncover the size of the welfare loss created by the seniority system i find that the seniority system negatively impacts the quality of representatives but has little effect on the outcomes of elections furthermore the most commonly proposed solution to the distortion term limits may have a significant negative effect on the quality of sitting representatives instead of a quantity constraint term limits i propose a change in the relative price of seniority by way of a pigouvian tax on seniority such a policy achieves the first best outcome

opportunistic political cycles test in a young democracy setting this paper tests the theory of opportunistic cycles in a decade old democracy russia finds strong evidence of cycles and provides an explanation for why previous literature often found weaker evidence using regional monthly panel data we find that 1 the budget cycle is sizable and short lived public spending shifts toward direct monetary transfers to voters 2 the magnitude of the cycle decreases with democracy government transparency media freedom voter awareness and over time and 3 preelectoral manipulation increases incumbents chances for reelection the short length of the cycle explains underestimation of its size by previous literature because of low frequency data used in previous studies

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

pork barrel politics and electoral returns at the local level does the targeted spending of public resources provide electoral benefits for incumbents despite the attention of scholars to that question the empirical results are mixed thus far the present paper supplies insights into the electoral benefits of discretionary funding on local elections i study the consequences of pork barrel politics in 7355 competitive mayoral elections in slovakia between 2006 and 2018 finding that more grants from the central government enhance the likelihood of mayors winning reelection the same advantage applies to mayors whose municipalities receive grants in local election years the effects of the number of grants obtained as well as the timing of their distribution are however moderated by municipal population more specifically a larger number of grants and resources obtained near the end of the mayoral term provides electoral benefits only to small town mayors but give no advantage to the mayors of larger urban areas

the impact of federal spending on house election outcomes while it is widely believed by academics politicians and the popular press that incumbent members of congress are rewarded by the electorate for bringing federal dollars to their district the empirical evidence supporting that claim is extremely weak one explanation for the failure to uncover the expected relationship between federal spending and election outcomes is that incumbents who expect to have difficulty being reelected are likely to exert greater effort in obtaining federal outlays since it is generally impossible to adequately measure this effort the estimated impact of spending is biased downward because of an omitted variable bias we address this estimation problem using instrumental variables for each house district we use spending outside the district but inside the state containing the district as an instrument for spending in the district federal spending is affected by a large number of actors e g governors senators mayors and other house members in the state delegation