Voters’ Response to Public Policies : Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the voters’ response to a public policy by exploiting a natural experiment aris ing from the 2006 Collective Clemency Bill in Italy. The design of the Bill created idiosyncratic incentives to recidivate across pardoned individuals . Our results show that these individual incentives created different polic y effects across municipalities. Cities where the incentives to recidivate of pardoned individuals resident in that municipality were higher, experien ced a higher recidivism rate. At the same time, a higher incentive to recid ivate at the municipal level lead to: a) newspapers reporting more crime ne ws relative to the pre-pardon period (as well as more crime news involving pardoned individuals); b) voters holding worse beliefs on the incumbent gov ernment’s crime control policies. Finally, the incumbent government’s exper ienced a worse electoral performance in the April 2008 elections relative t o the opposition coalition in municipalities where pardoned individuals had a higher incentive to recidivate. Overall, we provide direct empirical evi dence showing that voters receive private signals consistent with the effec ts of public policies. In turn, they use these information to form their po sterior beliefs on the quality of the incumbent government’s policies. Ulti mately, voters keep the incumbent government accountable by conditioning th eir vote on their posterior beliefs.
DTSTAMP:20260404T230159Z DTSTART:20151203T173000Z DTEND:20151203T190000Z SEQUENCE:0 TRANSP:OPAQUE END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR