The Office Makes the Politician

David Stadelmann

A chapter in Advances in Collective Decision Making, 2023, pp 395-410 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This paper explores behavioral changes regarding the political representation of voters by leveraging data from the Swiss Houses of Parliament. Although politicians in both houses are elected in the same geographical constituencies, public expectations would stipulate that politicians serving in the Council of States should focus relatively more on the preferences of their geographical constituency than on the nation, while the opposite should be the case for politicians serving in the National Council. I provide empirical evidence for such directional behavioral changes after politicians are elected. The evidence is consistent with the existence of an incentive effect of the office itself which acts on politicians to fulfill public expectations. Such an incentive effect, termed a “Thomas Becket incentive”, would be complementary to the established relevance of elections as a selection and incentive device.

Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stcchp:978-3-031-21696-1_22

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-21696-1_22

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