CREI Working Paper no . 2 / 2008 WOULD YOU TRUST AN ITALIAN POLITICIAN ? PRELIMINARY EVIDENCE FROM ITALIAN REGIONAL POLITICS by Emma Galli University “ La Sapienza ” of Rome ( Italy )

This paper evaluates the erosion of electoral accountability of the “Governors” of the Italian Regions in three subsequent political moments: 1) the elections; 2) the inaugural speeches of the Governor; 3) their first important policy decision, the long-term regional budget (DPEFR). We use content analysis (Laver et al., 2003) to assess the position of each Governor on a left to right distribution at the moment of the inaugural speeches and of the DPEFR. We then analyze the correlation between the distributions of 1) the electoral results and the inaugural speeches and 2) the inaugural speeches and the DPEFR, under the hypothesis that greater similarity can be interpreted as greater accountability. The analysis detects some erosion of accountability from the elections to the inaugural speeches, and a more serious one from the inaugural speeches to the DPEFR. A series of ANOVA tests suggests that the Region’s relative economic position/dependency on transfers from the central governments partly explains such loss of accountability. * Paper presented at the Colloque Annuel de la Société Québécoise de Science Politique (2007) and at the 2007 Scientific Meeting of the Italian Society of Public Economics (SIEP). We would like to thank Gianluigi Galeotti for his critical encouragement and Massimo Bordignon, Louis Imbeau, Francesco Lagona and Roberto Ricciuti for comments on previous versions of the paper. The usual caveat applies. 2 1. Goals of the analysis . You probably wouldn’t, would you? In this paper we try to give some empirical evidence to this widespread a priori. Specifically, we examine the electoral results, the programmatic speeches and the long-term budget documents (Documento di Programmazione Economica e Finanziaria Regionale, DPEFR) of the Presidents of the Italian Regions (usually and heretofore called “Governors”) and verify the degree of consistency among them. The greater this consistency, the greater the accountability of the Governors, and viceversa. We then look at the relative economic conditions of the Regions to verify how they affect such accountability. Before describing the analysis, three clarifications are in order: the first is about the theoretical underpinnings of our inquiry, the second about the methods and the strategy of the analysis, the third about the data and the selection of the sample. The theoretical literature on the political accountability (Persson, Roland and Tabellini, 1997; Persson and Tabellini, 2000) shows that, during a legislature, voters rationally allow the government to appropriate a certain amount of “rents from holding office”. Although this appropriation reduces their welfare, voters still reelect the government, in order to eliminate its incentives to divert even more. The extent to which this erosion occurs depends on 1) the institutional framework in which the principal-agent relationship between voters and representatives develops, as presidential systems are characterized by more slack than parliamentary ones; 2) the ideological heterogeneity of politicians competing for office, as a high degree of ideological polarization makes efficiency no longer the only criterion to evaluate the performance of elected politicians (Besley, Persson and Sturm, 2006); 3) the time horizon of the elected officials, whereby longer legislatures are characterized by lower electoral accountability. In particular, Persson, Roland and Tabellini (1997) and Lagona and Padovano (2007) show that elected officials enjoy greater discretionary power the further away they are from electoral events. We thus expect that an