Salience and Accountability: School Infrastructure and Last-minute Electoral Punishment

Abstract : Can seemingly unimportant factors influence voting decisions by making certain issues salient? We study this question in the context of Argentina’s 2015 presidential elections by examining how the quality of the infrastructure of the school where citizens were assigned to vote influenced their voting choice. Exploiting the quasi-random assignment of voters to ballot stations located in different public schools in the City of Buenos Aires, we find that individuals assigned to schools with poorer infrastructure were significantly less likely to vote for Mauricio Macri, the incumbent mayor then running for president. The effect is larger in low-income areas - where fewer people can afford private substitutes to public education - and in places where more households have children in school age. The effect is unlikely to be driven by information provision, since information on public school infrastructure was readily available to parents before elections. An alternative interpretation is that direct exposure to poor school infrastructure at the time of voting makes public education - and the poor performance of the incumbent - more salient.

---

Protests As Accountability Mechanism: Theory and Empirical Evidence of Brazil Mass Protest

Abstract : Citizens have used mass protests in democratic countries in order to signal their preferences or even to show their general dissatisfaction with the incumbent government. We propose a theory of protests as a Bayesian persuasion mechanism and we ask what are the conditions such that protests can be an efficient tool for accountability. We think about accountability in two ways. First, we see accountability purely as persuasion, as incumbents responding to the demands from the street. Secondly, we think about accountability in the sense of citizens reelecting incumbents that are responsive to the demands of the street with higher probability. We show that protests that don’t have a clear demand – and so may face a noisy communication channel, are not only less efficient, but they can be ex-ante inefficient as persuasion mechanism. Moreover, we show that less clear demands also lead to citizens replacing more the incumbent, which will be perceived as less responsive to the demands from the street. We then examine the effects of the large street protests that took place in Brazil in 2013 in both voters and federal legislators behavior. Consistent with the model, we find that there is heterogeneous effect of protests in terms of allocation of amendments related to protests demands, proposal of bills and presence in plenary sessions. Moreover, on average, protests reduced the probability of reelection of the incumbent. The data also allowed us to see interesting features of voters following the protests, such as decrease in turnout, increase in ”protest votes” (null votes), and decrease in incumbents’ vote share.

---

Brexit: Brinkmanship and Compromise

Abstract : We study how door die threats ending negotiations affect gridlock and welfare in the ratification of deals/treaties between opposing parties. Failure to agree in any period, as usual, implies a status-quo disagreement payoff and a continuation of the negotiation: a renegotiated amended agreement to be ratified next period. However, under brinkmanship, agreement failure in any period may precipitate instead a "hard" outcome, worse than the status-quo and than any feasible agreement. Such brinkmanship threats improve the scope for agreement, but also entail costs as we show. With symmetric parties only more extreme brinkmanship is beneficial: when an agreement is unlikely to begin with mild brinkmanship only reduces welfare by increasing the equilibrium chance of a hard outcome. If a party is advantaged it typically benefits even from mild threats, as the expected agreement shifts in its favor, while only extreme brinkmanship threats can benefit the disadvantaged party.

---

On the Workings of Tribal Politics

Abstract : This paper tries to understand the workings of economies in which an (endogenous) subset of voters support certain (“tribal”) candidates regardless of their policies; and politicians choose whether or not to run on a tribal ticket. Two political regimes emerge. Non-tribal politics is characterized by centrist policies. Tribal politics produces extreme policies, typically from the right, despite the fact that the tribal base is from the lower middle class. Allowing policy in one period to determine the income distribution in the next, the economy either converges to a steady state or cycles between tribal and non-tribal regimes, depending on the vote share of the minority group, the scope for redistributive policy, and the salience of inter-group disparities.

---