Flip-opping and Electoral Concerns

Giovanni Andreottola

CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy

Abstract: Politicians who change their mind on a policy issue are often confronted with the accusation of being flip-oppers. However, a changing environment sometimes makes policy revisions necessary. The model developed in this paper suggests that flip-opping signals that politicians are poorly informed and is therefore detrimental to their reputation. As a result, electorally concerned politicians can have an incentive to stick to an inefficient policy choice in order to avoid the stigma of flip-opping. This behaviour damages both the quality of policies and the ability of voters to select competent politicians through elections. The paper also provides an in-depth discussion of how institutional features of the policy-making environment interact with the problem of insufficient flip-opping: these include term limits, the presence of media and the partial delegation of actions to independent agents and can be found in the Online Appendix.

Keywords: flip-opping; elections; political agency; accountability; reputation; media; transparency; delegation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.csef.it/WP/wp558.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:sef:csefwp:558

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr. Maria Carannante ().