Coattail effects and electoral coordination

Ignacio Lago, Marina Costa Lobo and Santiago Lago-Peñas

No 1603, Working Papers. Collection B: Regional and sectoral economics from Universidade de Vigo, GEN - Governance and Economics research Network

Abstract: In this paper we challenge the conventional wisdom about the political consequences of electoral systems. We show that the psychological effects of an electoral system manifest themselves in founding elections in those countries in which there are coattail effects running from the more important to the less important offices. The artificial deflationary pressures induced by coattail effects make the psychological effects of electoral systems in elections for less important offices increase coordination failures after the founding election. The empirical evidence comes from district-level data in legislative, regional and European elections in five countries.

Keywords: Coattail effects; disproportionality; electoral systems; psychological effects; wasted votes. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2016-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://infogen.webs.uvigo.es/WPB/WP1603.pdf First version, 2016 (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:gov:wpregi:1603

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers. Collection B: Regional and sectoral economics from Universidade de Vigo, GEN - Governance and Economics research Network Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Patricio Sanchez-Fernandez ().