IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-01526021.html

A dirty deed done dirt cheap: Reporting the blame of a national reform on local politicians

Author

Listed:
  • Aurélie Cassette

    (EQUIPPE - Economie Quantitative, Intégration, Politiques Publiques et Econométrie - Université de Lille, Sciences et Technologies - Université de Lille, Sciences Humaines et Sociales - PRES Université Lille Nord de France - Université de Lille, Droit et Santé, LEM - Lille économie management - UMR 9221 - UA - Université d'Artois - UCL - Université catholique de Lille - ULCO - Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale - Université de Lille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Etienne Farvaque

    (LEM - Lille économie management - UMR 9221 - UA - Université d'Artois - UCL - Université catholique de Lille - ULCO - Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale - Université de Lille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

This paper tests the hypothesis that upper-level governments can transfer the accountability of the costs of a reform to a lower one. The reform of the school week in France provides the ground for a verification of the attribution of accountability hypothesis, as it was nationally decided and locally implemented, right before a municipal election. The results confirm that local incumbents have taken the blame of the reform, especially in larger cities. In this case, thus, the cost of the reform is borne twice by the lower level of government, financially and politically. So doing, the central government does a dirty deed to the local ones, for a very cheap cost. That mayors who have announced a boycott of the reform have received electoral gains confirms that some local politicians expected to be the fall guys, bearing the brunt of the costs of the reform.

Suggested Citation

  • Aurélie Cassette & Etienne Farvaque, 2016. "A dirty deed done dirt cheap: Reporting the blame of a national reform on local politicians," Post-Print hal-01526021, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01526021
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2016.04.001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aurélie Cassette & Etienne Farvaque, 2019. "Sticky decentralization? Evidence from the French school reform," Economics Working Paper from Condorcet Center for political Economy at CREM-CNRS 2019-03-ccr, Condorcet Center for political Economy.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation
    • H77 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - Intergovernmental Relations; Federalism
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01526021. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.