Biased Policy and Political Behavior

Avi Ben-Bassat and Momi Dahan

No 6269, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Unlike the previous literature on mass policy feedback, the present paper argues that a negative message embodied in public policy may foster or dampen political participation depending on social group affiliation. The policy change we use to examine the effect of biased policy (a negative message) on political behavior is the removal of elected mayors that were replaced by an appointed committee in a large number of Arab and Jewish municipalities in Israel which was skewed significantly towards Arab municipalities. We show that Arab voters in intervened municipalities are more likely to show up in the ballot boxes in national elections and they tend to vote more for Arab parties. In contrast, the political participation of Jewish citizens is lower in municipalities with an appointed council without noticeable effect on vote choice.

Keywords: policy feedback; political participation; vote choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D72 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6269.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6269

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().