Term Limits and Electoral Accountability∗
نویسندگان
چکیده
Periodic elections are the main instrument through which voters can hold politicians accountable. From this perspective term limits, which restrict voters’ ability to reward politicians with re-election, appear counterproductive. We show that despite the disciplining effect of elections, term limits can be ex ante welfare improving from the perspective of voters. By reducing the value of holding office term limits can induce politicians to implement policies that are closer to their private preferences. Such “truthful” behavior by incumbents in turn results in better screening of incumbents. We show that the combination of these two effects can strictly increase the utility of voters. JEL-Classification: D72, H11
منابع مشابه
Does Electoral Accountability Affect Economic Policy Choices? Evidence from Gubernatorial Term Limits*
This paper analyzes the behavior of U. S. governors from 1950 to 1986 to investigate a reputation-building model of political behavior. We argue that differences in the behavior of governors who face a binding term limit and those who are able to run again provides a source of variation in discount rates that can be used to test a political agency model. We find evidence that taxes, spending, a...
متن کاملHow Lasting Is Voter Gratitude? An Analysis of the Short and LongTerm Electoral Returns to Beneficial Policy
Dominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightedness may obstruct the welfare-improving effect of democratic accountability. However, we know little about how long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies. We exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster, the 2002 Elbe flooding i...
متن کاملPreferring a Pound of Cure to an Ounce of Prevention: Retrospective Voting and Failures in Electoral Accountability
Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? What are the consequences of failures in electoral accountability? Using a novel dataset on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward incumbents for delivering disaster relief spending but not for investing in disaster prevention spending. This failure of electoral accou...
متن کاملRepresentative misconduct, voter perceptions and accountability: Evidence from the 2009 House of Commons expenses scandal☆
This paper examines electoral accountability after the 2009-10 UK expenses scandal. Existing research shows that Members of Parliament (MPs) implicated in the scandal fared only marginally worse in the election than non-implicated colleagues. This lack of electoral accountability for misconduct could have arisen either because voters did not know about their representative's wrongdoing or becau...
متن کاملTerm Length and Political Performance
We evaluate the effects of the duration of legislative terms on the performance of legislators. We exploit a natural experiment in the Argentine House of Representatives where term lengths were assigned randomly. Results for various objective measures of legislative output show that longer terms enhance legislative performance. We use a second experiment in the Argentine Senate to determine whe...
متن کامل