The Weber-Fechner Law and Public Expenditures Impact to the Win-Margins at Parliamentary Elections

Paulo Mourão

Prague Economic Papers, 2012, vol. 2012, issue 3, 291-308

Abstract: This paper discusses the electoral implications of psychological motivation on voting functions. We tested a claim of the Weber-Fechner law as applied to electoral behaviour - specifically, that an expanded public sector leads politicians to make more significant, opportunistic distortions of public expenditures than the distortions observed when the public sector is diminished. We employed a system of simultaneous equations to test this hypothesis for cases observed in more than sixty democracies since 1960. We gave a special focus to the cases of Central and Eastern European countries. Our results confirm the main implications of the Weber-Fechner law. Years in incumbency, running for re-election, higher unemployment and higher inflation rates tend to generate negative moods, feelings and affects in the electorate; thus, these factors tend to approximate the vote share of the most voted party to the remaining vote share of the challenger political forces.

Keywords: voting; Central and Eastern European economies; Weber-Fechner law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 D72 P20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://pep.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.pep.425.html (text/html)
http://pep.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.pep.425.pdf (application/pdf)
free of charge

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:prg:jnlpep:v:2012:y:2012:i:3:id:425:p:291-308

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Editorial office Prague Economic Papers, University of Economics, nám. W. Churchilla 4, 130 67 Praha 3, Czech Republic
http://pep.vse.cz

DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.425

Access Statistics for this article

Prague Economic Papers is currently edited by Klára Pavlová

More articles in Prague Economic Papers from Prague University of Economics and Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stanislav Vojir ().