The impact of monitoring on politicians’ attendance: Evidence from the Swiss Upper House

Katharina Hofer and Mariana Lopes da Fonseca

Journal of Public Economics, 2024, vol. 239, issue C

Abstract: In 2014, the Swiss Upper House switched from voting by show of hands to an electronic voting system, where individual decisions on specific exogenously defined vote types are published automatically. We leverage this update in monitoring technology for select votes to identify the impact of monitoring on politicians’ attendance within a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences methodology. Relying on video recordings of all sessions of the 49th Upper House legislature (2011–2015), we determine pre- and post-reform attendance rates during all votes and compare the change in attendance between votes affected and unaffected by the reform. Monitoring has a positive and significant effect on attendance particularly among legislators running for reelection, as compared to those retiring at the end of the term.

Keywords: Attendance; Absenteeism; Monitoring; Transparency; Voting; Parliament (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272724001713
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:pubeco:v:239:y:2024:i:c:s0047272724001713

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2024.105235

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().