Guns, Environment, and Abortion: How Single-Minded Voters Shape Politicians' Decisions

Laurent Bouton, Paola Conconi, Francisco Pino and Maurizio Zanardi

No 232397092, Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department

Abstract: We study how electoral incentives affect policy choices on secondary issues, which only minorities of voters care intensely about. We develop a model in which office and policy motivated politicians choose to support or oppose regulations on these issues. We derive conditions under which politicians flip-flop, voting according to their policy preferences at the beginning of their terms, but in line with the preferences of single-issue minorities as they approach re-election. To assess the evidence, we study U.S. senators' votes on gun control, environment, and reproductive rights. In line with our model's predictions, election proximity has a pro-gun effect on Democratic senators and a pro-environment effect on Republican senators. These effects only arise for non-retiring senators, who represent states where the single-issue minority is of intermediate size. Also in line with our theory, election proximity has no impact on senators' decisions on reproductive rights, because of the presence of single-issue minorities on both sides.

Keywords: Electoral incentives; Environment; Gun control; Reproductive Rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 I18 K38 Q00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-univers ... casterWP2018_005.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Guns, environment and abortion: how single-minded voters shape politicians decisions (2018)
Working Paper: Guns, Environment, and Abortion: How Single-Minded Voters Shape Politicians' Decisions (2018)
Working Paper: Guns, Environment, and Abortion: How Single-Minded Voters Shape Politicians’ Decisions* (2018)
Working Paper: Guns, environment and abortion: how single-minded voters shape politicians decisions (2018)
Working Paper: Guns, Environment, and Abortion: How Single-Minded Voters Shape Politicians' Decisions (2018)
Working Paper: Guns, Environment, and Abortion: How Single-Minded Voters Shape Politicians' Decisions (2018)
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:lan:wpaper:232397092

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giorgio Motta ().