Political competition and legislative shirking in roll-call votes : Evidence from Germany for 1953–2017

Title data

Frank, Marco ; Stadelmann, David:
Political competition and legislative shirking in roll-call votes : Evidence from Germany for 1953–2017.
In: Public Choice. Vol. 189 (2021) Issue 3 . - pp. 555-575.
ISSN 0048-5829
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-021-00906-w

Official URL:

Abstract in another language

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 at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors between zero to four from the same constituency. We exploit the exogenous variation in 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 reduces absentee rates in roll-call votes by about 6.1 percentage points, which corresponds to almost half of the mean absentee rate in our sample. The effect is robust to the inclusion of other measures of political competition.

Further data

Item Type:	Article in a journal
Refereed:	Yes
Keywords:	Political competition; Accountability; Absence; Rent seeking; Political representation
Institutions of the University:	Faculties > Faculty of Law, Business and Economics > Department of Economics > Professor Economics with a focus on development economics > Professor Economics with a focus on development economics - Univ.-Prof. Dr. David Stadelmann Faculties Faculties > Faculty of Law, Business and Economics Faculties > Faculty of Law, Business and Economics > Department of Economics Faculties > Faculty of Law, Business and Economics > Department of Economics > Professor Economics with a focus on development economics
Result of work at the UBT:	Yes
DDC Subjects:	300 Social sciences > 320 Political science 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
Date Deposited:	13 Nov 2021 22:00
Last Modified:	05 Sep 2022 12:40
URI:	https://eref.uni-bayreuth.de/id/eprint/67822