Citizens or Clients? Evidence on Opportunistic Voting from a Natural Experiment in Greece*

Konstantinos Matakos and Dimitrios Xefteris

Political Science Research and Methods, 2016, vol. 4, issue 3, 493-531

Abstract: We exploit the act of the conservative Greek government (2004–2009) to fiddle the books as a natural experiment in order to document a causal link between government spending and electoral fragmentation and identify the mechanism via which it operates. The retrospective revision of Greece’s deficit figures just before the 2010 regional elections constituted an information shock, which generated expectations for reduced pork-barrel spending. We decompose the resulting effect and uncover the main mechanism taking place: rent-seeking voting and patronage (client-voters abandoning the dominant parties due to less expected rents). We find that expected spending cuts caused a steep decline (increase) in the electoral support for dominant parties (fragmentation). This effect is significantly more pronounced in patronage-intense regions. Using the size of public sector as a proxy for patronage (Hicken 2011), we find that support for dominant parties declined differentially by 5 percentage points more on those regions. That is, at least one in six voters that abandoned the big parties did so out of purely opportunistic motivations. Overall, our work highlights the importance of institutional constraints in affecting electoral and political power-sharing.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

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:cup:pscirm:v:4:y:2016:i:03:p:493-531_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Political Science Research and Methods from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().