Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/287505 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Citation: 
[Journal:] Public Choice [ISSN:] 1573-7101 [Volume:] 189 [Issue:] 3-4 [Publisher:] Springer US [Place:] New York, NY [Year:] 2021 [Pages:] 555-575
Publisher: 
Springer US, New York, NY
Abstract: 
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.
Subjects: 
Political competition
Accountability
Absence
Rent seeking
Political representation
JEL: 
D72
D78
H11
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.