CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 10Fiscal Policies and Political EconomyElectoral Systems and Political ParticipationLocal Government Finance and Decentralization

Voter Preferences, Electoral Promises, and the Composition of Public Spending

Open access
Keefer, Philip, Scartascini, Carlos, Vlaicu, Razvan·2020
DOI 10.18235/0002434
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

This paper proposes and empirically tests a new demand-side explanation for distortions in public spending composition. Voters prefer spending with certain and immediate benefits when they have low trust in electoral promises and high discount rates. The paper incorporates these characteristics of voter choices into a probabilistic voting model with public spending tradeoffs. In equilibrium, candidates promising larger allocations to transfers and short-term public goods are more likely to win elections in settings with low trust and high impatience. An original survey of individual-level preferences for public spending in seven Latin American capital cities provides observational and experimental evidence consistent with the model-derived hypotheses. Respondents reporting low trust in politician promises are more likely to prefer transfers to public goods; respondents with high discount rates prefer short-term to long-term spending. These patterns also appear in country-level data on spending outcomes from the last two decades.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18235/0002434

Cites

57 of 57 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • In the last few decades, trust in governments has been in decline, and interpersonal trust is also very low.

    “In the last few decades, trust in governments has been in decline (OECD, 2018;Keefer et al., 2020), and interpersonal trust is also very low.”

    From Transparency and Trust in Government. Evidence from a Survey Experiment (2021) · cites this paper as Keefer et al., 2020

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 58 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Keefer, P., Scartascini, C., & Vlaicu, R.
ORCID
Publisher
Inter-American Development Bank
Published
2020-06-16
DOI
10.18235/0002434
OpenAlex
W3042321213
Cited by
10
References
58
Citations by year
2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 4
Type
report
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • SSRN Electronic Journal (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • Econstor (Econstor) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Fiscal Policies and Political Economy
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Local Government Finance and Decentralization
Keywords
public expenditure structure, voter preferences, campaign promises, trust in politicians, discount rate, probabilistic voting model, transfer payments, fiscal distortions, Latin America

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review