Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/225562 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
CREMA Working Paper No. 2020-20
Publisher: 
Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA), Zürich
Abstract: 
We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures that there is always at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors from the same constituency from zero to four. We exploit the exogenous variation of elected competitors by investigating changes in competition induced by legislators who leave parliament during the legislative period and their respective replacement candidates in an instrumental variables setting with legislator fixed effects. The existence of elected competitors from the same constituency decreases absence rates in roll-call votes by about 6.1 percentage points, which corresponds to almost half of the mean absence rate in our sample. This effect is robust to the inclusion of other measures for political competition.
Subjects: 
Political Competition
Accountability
Absence
Rent Seeking
Political Representation
JEL: 
D72
D78
H11
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
482.81 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.