MET Seminar - Antoine Loeper (Carlos III, Madrid)
| Dates: | 15 November 2023 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Current University students |
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Title: Legislative priorities and the structure of government (joint with Wiola Dziuda)
Abstract: Why do voters often elect governments in which several parties share power? To answer that question, we propose a dynamic model of elections and policy making in which in every period, a representative voter decides whether to elect a unified government---in which a single party controls policy making---or a divided government---in which the agenda and veto powers are held by different parties. The elected government then observes a common shock to the players' preferences, and decides which of two policy dimensions to reform, if any. On the consensual policy dimension, both parties and the voter have congruent preferences (e.g., infrastructure), whereas on the divisive dimension (e.g., taxation), they disagree with positive probability: party l ® has more leftist (rightist) preferences than the voter. Crucially, the government faces an agenda constraint in that it can change only one dimension of the status quo, which is inherited from the previous government.
We show that a divided government leads more often to gridlock. However, the voter elects a divided government, because she fears that a unified government will waste its legislative time on divisive reforms in line with its own ideology, which may crowd out potentially beneficial consensual reforms.
Manchester Economic Theory (MET) schedule: http://daviddelacretaz.net/seminars/
Speaker website: https://sites.google.com/view/antoineloeper/
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Boardroom 2.016
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
