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The Political Cost of Reforms

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  • Alessandra Bonfiglioli
  • Gino Gancia

Abstract

This paper formalizes in a fully-rational model the popular idea that politicians perceive an electoral cost in adopting costly reforms with future benets and reconciles it with the evidence that reformist governments are not punished by voters. To do so, it proposes a model of elections where political ability is ex-ante unknown and investment in reforms is unobservable. On the one hand, elections improve accountability and allow to keep well-performing incumbents. On the other, politicians make too little reforms in an attempt to signal high ability and increase their reappointment probability. Although in a rational expectation equilibrium voters cannot be fooled and hence reelection does not depend on reforms, the strategy of underinvesting in reforms is nonetheless sustained by out-of-equilibrium beliefs. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, uncertainty makes reforms more politically viable and may, under some conditions, increase social welfare. The model is then used to study how political rewards can be set so as to maximize social welfare and the desirability of imposing a one-term limit to governments. The predictions of this theory are consistent with a number of empirical regularities on the determinants of reforms and reelection. They are also consistent with a new stylized fact documented in this paper: economic uncertainty is associated to more reforms in a panel of 20 OECD countries.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Barcelona Graduate School of Economics in its series Working Papers with number 507.

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Date of creation: Sep 2010
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Handle: RePEc:bge:wpaper:507

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Keywords: Elections; Reforms; Asymmetric Information; Uncertainty;

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References

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Citations

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Cited by:
  1. Madhav S, Aney & Maitreesh Ghatak & Massimo Morelli, 2011. "Can Market Failure Cause Political Failure?," STICERD - Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers Series 029, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
  2. Alessandra Bonfiglioli & Gino Gancia, 2009. "Growth, selection and appropriate contracts," Economics Working Papers 1345, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Jul 2012.
  3. Giacomo Ponzetto & Ugo Troiano, 2012. "Social Capital, Government Expenditures, and Growth," Working Papers 612, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics.

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