Powers that be? Political alignment, government formation, and government stability

Felipe Carozzi, Davide Cipullo and Luca Repetto

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We study how partisan alignment across levels of government affects coalition formation and government stability using a regression discontinuity design and a large dataset of Spanish municipal elections. We document a positive effect of alignment on both government formation and stability. Alignment increases the probability that the most-voted party appoints the mayor and decreases the probability that the government is unseated during the term. Aligned parties also obtain sizeable electoral gains in the next elections. We show that these findings are not the consequence of favoritism in the allocation of transfers towards aligned governments.

Keywords: government stability; government formation; political alignment; inter-governmental relations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H20 H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 9 pages
Date: 2024-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Public Economics, 1, February, 2024, 230. ISSN: 0047-2727

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120574/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Powers that be? Political alignment, government formation, and government stability (2024)
Working Paper: Powers That Be? Political Alignment, Government Formation, and Government Stability (2022)
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:ehl:lserod:120574

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().