Concurrent Elections and Political Accountability: Evidence from Italian Local Elections

Emanuele Bracco and Federico Revelli

Department of Economics and Statistics Cognetti de Martiis. Working Papers from University of Turin

Abstract: This paper analyses the effects of holding concurrent elections in multi-tiered government structures on turnout decision and voting behaviour, based on municipal and provincial electoral data from Italy during the 2000s. When the less-salient provincial elections are held concurrently with the highly salient municipal elections, we observe three main effects: (1) turnout increases significantly by almost ten percentage points; (2) issues that are specific of the more salient (mayoral) contest affect the less salient (provincial) contest, with mayors' fiscal decisions impacting on the vote share of provincial incumbents; (3) issues that are specific to the less salient (provincial) contest stop affecting provincial elections outcomes. These findings shed light on how voters acquire information on incumbent politicians, and proves that the effectiveness of an election as an accountability tool may be hindered by the concurrence with higher-stakes elections.

Pages: pages 27
Date: 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.est.unito.it/do/home.pl/Download?doc=/a ... 17dip/wp_19_2017.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Concurrent elections and political accountability: Evidence from Italian local elections (2018)
Working Paper: Concurrent Elections and Political Accountability: Evidence from Italian Local Elections (2017)
Working Paper: Concurrent Elections and Political Accountability: Evidence from Italian Local Elections (2017)
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:uto:dipeco:201719

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics and Statistics Cognetti de Martiis. Working Papers from University of Turin Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Laura Ballestra () and Cinzia Carlevaris ().