Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP8832
Authors: Francesco Caselli; Tom Cunningham; Massimo Morelli; Ins Moreno de Barreda
Abstract: Much literature on political behavior treats politicians as motivated by reelection, choosing actions to signal their types to voters. We identify two novel implications of models in which signalling incentives are important. First, because incumbents only care about clearing a reelection hurdle, signals will tend to cluster just above the threshold needed for reelection. This generates a skew distribution of signals leading to an incumbency advantage in the probability of election. Second, voters can exploit the signalling behavior of politicians by precommitting to a higher threshold for signals received. Raising the threshold discourages signalling effort by low quality politicians but encourages effort by high quality politicians, thus increasing the separation of signals and improving the selection function of an election. This precommitment has a simple institutional interpretation as a supermajority rule, requiring that incumbents exceed some fraction of votes greater than 50% to be reelected. A simple calibration suggests the average quality of US Congress members would be maximised by requiring a 57% vote share for reelection.
Keywords: incumbency advantage; signalling; supermajority
JEL Codes: D72; D78; D82
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Incumbency (D72) | Skewed distribution of signals (C46) |
| Signaling behavior of incumbents (D72) | Incumbency advantage (D72) |
| Signaling effort (D79) | Reelection outcomes (D72) |
| Middle-quality incumbents (L15) | Signaling effort (D79) |
| Increasing threshold for reelection (D72) | Quality of elected officials (D72) |
| Threshold for reelection (D72) | Reelection rates of lower-quality incumbents (D79) |
| Threshold for reelection (D72) | Signaling of higher-quality incumbents (L15) |