New Perspectives on Political Accountability

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political accountability is an age old concern in all societies. Do elected representatives take actions that benefit their constituents? How do political and career concerns impact policy making by bureaucrats? Do voters use all available information to make their electoral decisions? The papers on this panel address these questions related to political accountability across democracies in different regions of the world: Brazil, Ghana, India and the USA. Slough and Yu develop an accountability model to study whether entrenchment of elected politicians affects bureaucratic selection and discipline. They test their predictions on Brazilian municipal data. Goyal and Harding carry out a conjoint experiment to look at whether policy promises that are attributable to politicians’ effort influence voting behavior in Ghana and India. Desai, Karekurve-Ramachandra and Montero develop and estimate a dynamic model of political accountability with moral hazard and adverse selection to examine welfare implications of gender quotas in Mumbai, India, independent of their descriptive consequences. Iaryczower and Lopez-Moctezuma build and estimate a model of deliberation in the US Federal Reserve's monetary policy committee (FOMC) to examine how career concerns shape the recommendations of committee members and monetary policy outcomes. The panel assembles scholars from different subfields that engage with varied aspects of political accountability using novel data and a wide array of approaches, including formal modeling, conjoint experiments, structural estimation, and natural experiments.

Sub Unit

• Division 6: Political Economy

Chair

• Macartan Humphreys Columbia University

Discussants

• Pablo Querubin New York University

• Gregory John Martin Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• Political Entrenchment and Bureaucratic Quality - Tara L Slough, New York University; Tinghua Yu, Birkbeck, University of London

• Can Attribution Improve Accountability? Experimental Evidence from India & Ghana - Tanushree Goyal, Harvard University; Robin Harding, University of Oxford

• How Do Gender Quotas Impact Electoral Accountability? - Zuheir Desai, IE University; Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra, University of Rochester; Sergio Montero, University of Rochester

• Do Career Concerns shape Monetary Policy: Evidence from Deliberations in the FOMC - Gabriel Lopez-Moctezuma, California Institute of Technology; Matias Iaryczower, Princeton University