IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sef/csefwp/558.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Flip-opping and Electoral Concerns

Author

Abstract

Politicians who change their mind on a policy issue are often confronted with the accusation of being flip-oppers. However, a changing environment sometimes makes policy revisions necessary. The model developed in this paper suggests that flip-opping signals that politicians are poorly informed and is therefore detrimental to their reputation. As a result, electorally concerned politicians can have an incentive to stick to an inefficient policy choice in order to avoid the stigma of flip-opping. This behaviour damages both the quality of policies and the ability of voters to select competent politicians through elections. The paper also provides an in-depth discussion of how institutional features of the policy-making environment interact with the problem of insufficient flip-opping: these include term limits, the presence of media and the partial delegation of actions to independent agents and can be found in the Online Appendix.

Suggested Citation

  • Giovanni Andreottola, 2020. "Flip-opping and Electoral Concerns," CSEF Working Papers 558, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy.
  • Handle: RePEc:sef:csefwp:558
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.csef.it/WP/wp558.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Giorgio Bellettini & Paolo Roberti, 2020. "Politicians’ coherence and government debt," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 182(1), pages 73-91, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    flip-opping; elections; political agency; accountability; reputation; media; transparency; delegation;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:sef:csefwp:558. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: . General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cssalit.html .

    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: Dr. Maria Carannante (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cssalit.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.