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The Political Cost of Reforms

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  • Alessandra Bonfiglioli
  • Gino Gancia
Abstract
This paper formalizes in a fully-rational model the popular idea that politicians perceive an electoral cost in adopting costly reforms with future benefits and reconciles it with the evidence that reformist governments are not punished by voters. To do so, it proposes a model of elections where political ability is ex-ante unknown and investment in reforms is unobservable. On the one hand, elections improve accountability and allow to keep well-performing incumbents. On the other, politicians make too little reforms in an attempt to signal high ability and increase their reappointment probability. Although in a rational expectation equilibrium voters cannot be fooled and hence reelection does not depend on reforms, the strategy of underinvesting in reforms is nonetheless sustained by out-of-equilibrium beliefs. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, uncertainty makes reforms more politically viable and may, under some conditions, increase social welfare. The model is then used to study how political rewards can be set so as to maximize social welfare and the desirability of imposing a one-term limit to governments. The predictions of this theory are consistent with a number of empirical regularities on the determinants of reforms and reelection. They are also consistent with a new stylized fact documented in this paper: economic uncertainty is associated to more reforms in a panel of 20 OECD countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Alessandra Bonfiglioli & Gino Gancia, 2010. "The Political Cost of Reforms," UFAE and IAE Working Papers 847.10, Unitat de Fonaments de l'Anàlisi Econòmica (UAB) and Institut d'Anàlisi Econòmica (CSIC), revised 30 May 2011.
    • Handle: RePEc:aub:autbar:847.10
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    Cited by:

    1. Alessandra Bonfiglioli & Gino Gancia, 2014. "Growth, Selection and Appropriate Contracts," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 17(1), pages 21-38, January.
    2. Alessandro Turrini & Gabor Koltay & Fabiana Pierini & Clarisse Goffard & Aron Kiss, 2015. "A decade of labour market reforms in the EU: insights from the LABREF database," IZA Journal of Labor Policy, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 4(1), pages 1-33, December.
    3. Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto & Ugo Troiano, 2012. "Social capital, government expenditures, and growth," Economics Working Papers 1307, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Jan 2024.
    4. Morelli, Massimo & Ghatak, Maitreesh & Aney, Madhav, 2011. "Can Market Failure Cause Political Failure," CEPR Discussion Papers 8533, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    5. Levy, Raphaël, 2014. "Soothing politics," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 126-133.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Elections; Reforms; Asymmetric Information; Uncertainty.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E6 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook
    • H3 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents

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