Young versus Old Politicians in Local Politics

Thushyanthan Baskaran, Zohal Hessami and Sebastian Schirner ()
Additional contact information
Sebastian Schirner: Ruhr University Bochum

No 17009, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Do young politicians prioritize other types of municipal spending than old politicians? We study this question using hand-collected candidate-level data on municipal elections (1996-2020), along with detailed administrative data on municipal spending in Bavaria. Our identification strategy makes use of within-party candidate-level races for marginal seats. Our findings indicate that municipalities with a higher proportion of young councilors allocate more resources to social spending. Further analysis reveals that this social spending increase is primarily driven by the expansion of public child care. Exploring mechanisms, we find evidence suggesting that young councilors affect policy choices in- directly through between- and within-party bargaining.

Keywords: young and old politicians; political selection; municipal spending; local councils (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 H70 H72 J13 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2024-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-lab, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17009.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp17009

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().