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vfs-2025-pid-128917_1
Journal article

Decision-Makers as Decision-Shapers : Evidence on the Influence of Lesilator's Decisions in Parliament on Voter Preferences

BP2-STS

  • 2025
Published in:
  • Beiträge zur Jahrestagung des Verein für Socialpolitik 2025: Revival of Industrial Policy. - ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Kiel, Hamburg. - 2025
voter preferences
public opinion
representative democracy
political influence
decision-making
English This paper examines whether legislators’ policy positions causally affect revealed voter preferences on real policy proposals in the Swiss direct democracy. We leverage close elections between policy-supporting and policy-opposing candidates that provide quasi-random variation in legislators’ policy positions to identify the causality. Using a regression discontinuity design, we compare voter preferences on 254 policy proposals subject to referenda held between 1996 and 2023 across constituencies where candidates with opposing positions on the policy narrowly defeated each other in close elections. We find that an additional policy supporter among the representatives of a constituency increases constituency-level voter policy support by 6.9 percentage points. Treatment effects are largest for votes with limited media coverage and extensive campaign expenditures. These results demonstrate that legislators shape voter preferences rather than merely representing them.
Faculty
Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales et du management
Department
Département d'économie politique
Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
Other electronic version

Published version

License
License undefined
Open access status
green
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/334101
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