Publication: Essays on Political Economy
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2023
Defense date
2023-06-20
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Abstract
This dissertation starts from the observation that, in most democracies, political competition is organized along party lines. Political parties are generally resilient organizations that survive electoral defeats; hence, we refer to them as long-lived organizations. A widespread assumption in the dynamic political economy literature is that electoral competition involves politicians who cannot run again for office after an electoral defeat and thus, have an effectively shorter time horizon when making policy choices. In this dissertation, consisting of two non-coauthored and one coauthored paper, I explore the implications of long-lived parties for policy-making, electoral competitiveness, interest groups’ rent-seeking, and, more broadly, voters’ welfare.
Rather than a purely technical assumption, the long-liveness of political par-ties is important for understanding the political economy and the policy-making of developed countries in the last decades. Before the 2008 economic crisis, western democracies were generally characterized by stable party systems. In those party systems, political parties could expect to remain electorally competitive beyond the immediate future and to regain power if they lost it. Since the 2008 crash, how-ever, the medium-term survival of major parties has grown increasingly uncertain. European major political families after 1945, the Social Democrats and the Con-servatives or the Christian Democrats, have decreased their electoral turnout. New parties from the radical left, populist right, green or liberal family have appeared—and sometimes disappeared after some electoral cycles. In other countries like the US, the party system has not been plagued with new competitors but party elites are subjected to intense pressure from outsiders. To understand the implications of this change, we need a theory of how long-lived parties’ behavior differs from the one of short-lived organizations or independent political candidates.
The first chapter of this dissertation studies how the long-liveness assumption affects the dynamic incentives of parties to prioritize reelection against other policy objectives. In particular, it emphasizes how the parties’ choices when they hold power are affected by their expectations about the rival party’s future choices. The second chapter delves into how political parties can achieve long-term agreements with other political organizations, like interest groups and lobbies, due to their long-lived nature. Hence, this chapter studies the quid-pro-quo dynamic agreements between an interest group and two political parties and how these agreements evolve with the process of political turnover. Lastly, the third chapter analyzes the infor-mational role of the opposition party’s promise to repeal the incumbent party’s policies. This chapter wants to improve our understanding of how the opposition can influence policy-making even if it is out of power and lacks any form of veto power.
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Mención Internacional en el título de doctor
Keywords
Economía, Política económica, Teoría de juegos, Instituciones políticas, Instituciones políticas