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Keep Your Enemies Closer: How Do Leaders Redistribute Partisan Goods?

Fri, September 16, 2:00 to 3:30pm, TBA

Abstract

Delegation is the cornerstone of any well-functioning parliament. Collectively, parties enable policy-making: they pool political resources and ease the negotiation of policy coalition. Legislative leaders play a crucial role in this process: they represent the party during negotiation with other parties but also structure the daily partisan activity, by coordinating the individual actions of all MPs. To do so, they have the power of deciding what the party policy objectives are and how should partisan resources be spent in order to reach the objectives. Optimal use of these resources implies redistribution and delegation. This paper formerly and empirically investigates how legislative leaders distribute partisan resources among their MPs.

When they redistribute resources, leaders face a trade-off. On the one hand, they can favor ideologically close MPs and reduce moral hazard. On the other hand, they can favor well-known MPs, to ensure their loyalty and prevent their costly defection. Using formal models, I demonstrate that the leaders’ optimal redistribution strategy depends on the intra-partisan ideological polarisation but also on how MPs balance office payoffs and policy payoffs.

I used newly collected data from Canada, Germany, and Spain to empirically investigate how the office vs. policy payoffs actually influence redistribution among MPs. Using the electoral system as an instrument, I eventually show that personalized electoral systems provide less leverage to leaders, who need to redistribute more well-known MPs. As such, personalized systems are less able to cope with intra-partisan heterogeneity.

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