Legislators in the Crossfire: The Effect of Transparency on Parliamentary Voting

Heloise Clolery ()
Additional contact information
Heloise Clolery: CREST-Ecole polytechnique, France

No 2021-12, Working Papers from Center for Research in Economics and Statistics

Abstract: Legislators are agents who serve two different principals: their constituents and their Party. Legislators are caught in the crossfire if their Party leaders' position contradicts the electorate's interests. Legislators care about their reputation with both principals as they are career-motivated. Making their votes public increases the incentive to use voting for reputation-building, and therefore distortion in group decision-making. This paper first shows that reputational concerns drive the decision to participate in a vote. Second, the French transparency reform of 2014 provides a quasi-natural setting for a Difference-in-Differences analysis. Greater transparency has led to less participation and more alignment to the Party line. As such, knowing that their behavior is more easily observable, legislators prefer not to take sides, and additional information benefits Party leaders more than constituents in the short term. The effect size is sufficient to switch results in 12 percent of the vote outcomes.

Keywords: Voting; Transparency; Party discipline; Principal agent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2021-08-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-isf, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://crest.science/RePEc/wpstorage/2021-12.pdf CREST working paper version (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:crs:wpaper:2021-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Research in Economics and Statistics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Secretariat General () and Murielle Jules Maintainer-Email : murielle.jules@ensae.Fr.