"Keefer and Vlaicu demonstrate that sharply different policy choices across democracies can be explained as a consequence of differences in the ability of political competitors to make credible pre-electoral commitments to voters. Politicians can overcome their credibility deficit in two ways. First, they can build reputations. This requires that they fulfill preconditions that in practice are costly--informing voters of their promises, tracking those promises, and ensuring that voters turn out on election day. Alternatively, they can rely on intermediaries--patrons--who are already able to make credible commitments to their clients. Endogenizing credibility in this way, the authors find that targeted transfers and corruption are higher and public good provision lower than in democracies in which political competitors can make credible pre-electoral promises. They also argue that in the absence of political credibility, political reliance on patrons enhances welfare in the short run, in contrast to the traditional view that clientelism in politics is a source of significant policy distortion. However, in the long run reliance on patrons may undermine the emergence of credible political parties. The model helps to explain several puzzles. For example, public investment and corruption are higher in young democracies than old; and democratizing reforms succeeded remarkably in Victorian England, in contrast to the more difficult experiences of many democratizing countries, such as the Dominican Republic. This paper--a product of the Growth and Investment Team, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to investigate the political economy of development"--World Bank web site.

The authors demonstrate that sharply different policy choices across democracies can be explained as a consequence of differences in the ability of political competitors to make credible pre-electoral commitments to voters. Politicians can overcome their credibility deficit in two ways. First, they can build reputations. This requires that they fulfill preconditions that in practice are costly: informing voters of their promises; tracking those promises; ensuring that voters turn out on election day. Alternatively, they can rely on intermediaries -- patrons - who are already able to make credible commitments to their clients. Endogenizing credibility in this way, the authors find that targeted transfers and corruption are higher and public good provision lower than in democracies in which political competitors can make credible pre-electoral promises. The authors also argue that in the absence of political credibility, political reliance on patrons enhances welfare in the short-run, in contrast to the traditional view that clientelism in politics is a source of significant policy distortion. However, in the long run reliance on patrons may undermine the emergence of credible political parties. The model helps to explain several puzzles. For example, public investment and corruption are higher in young democracies than old; and democratizing reforms succeeded remarkably in Victorian England, in contrast to the more difficult experiences of many democratizing countries, such as the Dominican Republic.

This paper proposes a structural approach to measuring the effects of electoral accountability. We estimate a political agency model with imperfect information in order to identify and quantify discipline and selection effects, using data on U.S. governors for 1982-2012. We find that the possibility of reelection provides a significant incentive for incumbents to exert effort. We also find a selection effect, although it is weaker in terms of its effect on average governor performance. According to our model, the widely-used two-term regime improves voter welfare by 4.2% compared to a one-term regime, and find that a three-term regime may improve voter welfare even further.

This paper examines new data on public sector employees from eighteen Latin American countries to shed light on the role of trust in the performance of government agencies. We developed an original survey taken during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic that includes randomized experiments with pandemic-related treatments. We document that individual-level trust in coworkers, other public employees, and citizens is positively related to performance-enhancing behaviors, such as cooperation and information sharing, and policy attitudes, such as openness to technological innovations in public service delivery. Trust is more strongly linked to positive behaviors and attitudes in non-merit-based civil service systems. High-trust and low-trust respondents report different assessments of their main work constraints. Also, they draw different inferences and prefer different policy responses when exposed to data-based framing treatments about social distancing outcomes in their countries. Low-trust public employees are more likely to assign responsibility for a negative outcome to the government and to prefer stricter enforcement of social distancing.

We present a model of parties-in-legislatures that can support partisan policy outcomes despite the absence of any party-imposed voting discipline. Legislators choose all procedures and policies through majority-rule bargaining and cannot commit to vote against their preferences on either. Yet, off-median policy bias occurs in equilibrium because a majority of legislators with correlated preferences has policy-driven incentives to adopt partisan agenda-setting rules - as a consequence, bills reach the floor disproportionately from one side of the ideological spectrum. The model recovers as special cases the claims of both partisan and non-partisan theories in the ongoing debate over the nature of party influence in the U.S. Congress. We show that: (1) party influence increases in polarization, and (2) the legislative median controls policymaking only when there are no bargaining frictions and no polarization. We discuss the implications of our findings for the theoretical and empirical study of legislatures.

We exploit new experimental and quasi-experimental data to investigate voters' intrinsic motivation to engage politically. Does the right to vote increase engagement or, given incentives to free ride, do eligible voters remain rationally unengaged? Does knowledge that one's group is pivotal reduce free riding? And are the politically engaged influenced by election-relevant policy information? To address these questions, we fielded a survey of 5,400 Mexican high school seniors just prior to the 2018 general election. Age-based regression discontinuity results show that the just-eligible exhibit higher measures of low-cost political engagement than the just-ineligible. One survey experiment reveals that information that the youth vote will be pivotal increases eligible respondents' interest in the presidential debate and the election result. In another, information about current policy outcomes affects future policy priorities in ways consistent with the incentives of eligible respondents to collect relevant information on salient policy issues.

This paper proposes and empirically tests a new demand-side explanation for distortions in public spending composition. Voters prefer spending with certain and immediate benefits when they have low trust in electoral promises and high discount rates. The paper incorporates these characteristics of voter choices into a probabilistic voting model with public spending tradeoffs. In equilibrium, candidates promising larger allocations to transfers and short-term public goods are more likely to win elections in settings with low trust and high impatience. An original survey of individual-level preferences for public spending in seven Latin American capital cities provides observational and experimental evidence consistent with the model-derived hypotheses. Respondents reporting low trust in politician promises are more likely to prefer transfers to public goods; respondents with high discount rates prefer short-term to long-term spending. These patterns also appear in country-level data on spending outcomes from the last two decades.