Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 05/2012

Electoral Personalism and Economic Policy

Daniel Kselman

February 2012

The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies

Abstract

What effect do a country’s electoral institutions have on its economic policy? While past research has emphasized the policy consequences of majoritarian as opposed to proportional electoral formulae, this paper emphasizes a country’s ballot structure and, in particular, whether or not its electoral rules allow citizens to cast intraparty candidate votes. I first develop a theoretical framework that yields a set of original predictions linking intraparty voting rules to the incidence of political corruption, the emphasis on redistributive social policy, and the overall size of the state. Empirical tests then confirm that intraparty voting rules exert a significant and reductive effect on the incidence of political corruption but that they do not undermine the production of egalitarian fiscal policy. Taken together, the paper’s theoretical and empirical results should contribute to broader normative debates about the viability of decentralized and personalistic forms of democratic accountability.