Week-end read: B. Marx

Week-end read: B. Marx

On electoral turnovers
  • Silhouettes of heads discussing ideasSilhouettes of heads discussing ideas

When the Department was created a little over 10 years ago, it simultaneously created its own collection of working papers – the Sciences Po Economics Discussion Paper series. Our goal is to make our latest research available to fellow economists, scholars and institutions all over the world as soon as possible.

The collection is available online on our website and will soon be completely available as well on the new the Sciences Po-HAL Institution Repository (former SPIRE) where it is linked to RePEC’s EconPapers.

As you will discover, the collection attests to the broadening of the Department’s topics, along with the recruitment of new, brilliant researchers, to include a theoretical economics research cluster, development economics and the extension of its expertise in macroeconomics, dealing notably with informational frictions – without neglecting its core fields in political economy, international economics, labour economics and econometrics.

Under the scientific direction of Department Head Thierry MAYER and permanent faculty member Benjamin MARX, our discussion papers have been flourishing – they are almost systematically taken up by international research networks and institutions in their working paper series (CEPR, IZA, NBER, …).

If you are looking for something to read over the holidays and weekends, we are spotlighting a few recent Sciences Po Economics Discussion Papers from our younger researchers that have been picking up traction.

Benjamin MarxBenjamin MARX joined the permanent faculty of the Department in 2018, just after defending his thesis at the Massuchessets Institute of Technology (MIT).

Specialised in political economy and development, his research focuses on the determinants of political accountability, state capacity, and voting behaviour in developing countries.

His recent paper Electoral Turnovers (Sciences Po Econ DP 2022-03, February 2022), co-authored with Vincent PONS (Harvard Business School) and Vincent ROLLET (PhD Candidate, MIT), has been disseminated by both the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR DP 17047) and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER WP 29766).

The paper tackles a blindspot in the literature on the consequences of electoral turnovers on the national level, i.e. how they may affect country performance. Some important work has been done on the impact of term limits in local elections as well as on the impact on growth of power transitions in autocracies.

Intuitively, the impact of electoral turnovers on country performance could go either way: as Benjamin and co-authors write, they “could give new impetus to a country’s performance by bringing to power new leaders facing stronger reelection incentives and reputation concerns” but the “the loss of political experience, the personnel instability, and the policy uncertainty created by turnovers could be detrimental to economic performance”.

One of the main difficulties confronting researchers in evaluating the impact of electoral turnovers is the fact that they are often the result of an economic downturn, i.e. they are not random events. An uptick in country performance after elections may not be due so much to the newly-elected government’s characteristics as it may be due to the economic cycle. Another difficulty in analyzing the consequences of electoral turnovers is the wide range of outcomes to consider – not only may they have an impact on economic performance but also on “international trade, human development, peace, and the quality of democracy”.

To address these questions, Benjamin and co-authors built a novel dataset of national election results, worldwide since 1945. They focus on close elections in which the incumbent narrowly lost or won in order to be able to attribute economic performance to the election outcomes. 

The ambition of their paper is timely: as Benjamin and co-authors write, “(a)ssessing the costs and benefits of turnovers is particularly relevant to current debates on the merits of democracy prompted by democratic backsliding in many countries”.

They find, overall, that “voting for change matters: electoral turnovers deliver improvements in country level performance along many dimensions” and “provides reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the prospects of electoral democracy”.

For a complete discussion of their approach and their results, read the paper ! 

More about Benjamin MARX and his research
Discover the full Sciences Po Economics Discussion Paper series

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