Pay for politicians and campaign spending: evidence from the French municipal elections

Nicolas Gavoille

Public Choice, 2021, vol. 188, issue 3, No 8, 455-477

Abstract: Abstract This paper studies the relationship between politicians’ pay and the campaign spending of candidates running in the French municipal elections. For that purpose, I construct a dataset containing the campaign records of all lists running in the 2008 and 2014 elections in municipalities of more than 9000 inhabitants. I implement a regression discontinuity design exploiting a population threshold in elected officials’ pay. The results show that, around the 20,000-inhabitant threshold, the pay level negatively impacts candidates’ spending. That puzzling result is not only statistically significant, but also economically sizeable: the amounts spent by lists running in municipalities just above the threshold are up to 35% less than those of lists running just below the population threshold. The result combines with an important reduction in the intensity of political competition, favoring an incumbent’s reelection. I also provide some evidence of a decline in mayoral quality. The results suggest that politicians’ pay does shape their incentives, but higher pay can favor the persistence of low-quality mayors.

Keywords: Electoral campaign; Politicians’ pay; Quality of politicians; Regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11127-020-00839-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:pubcho:v:188:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s11127-020-00839-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-020-00839-w

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().