Voter turnout and public sector employment policy
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Voter turnout and public sector employment policy Sebastian Garmann 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Economic theory suggests that high voter turnout is not necessarily welfare maximizing. Low turnout elections, however, might be captured by interest groups. Using data from German local governments in the period 1993–2015, I empirically study the link between turnout and policy outcomes. Local public sector employment policy responds to plausibly exogenous turnout shocks in elections for the head of the local public administration, in which public employees are arguably an important interest group. Specifically, using concurrent elections as an instrument for turnout, I find that low turnout significantly changes public employment policy in favor of the public employees. Keywords Turnout . Special-interest politics . Election timing . Voting costs . Public
employment . Mobilization JEL classifications D72 . D73 . H7
1 Introduction Is high voter turnout to be welcomed? Political scientists would mostly answer this question in the affirmative, as they regard the representativeness of the election outcome as the main priority and suspect that unequal participation at the polls results in unequal representation and policies that are biased against non-voters (e.g., Lijphart 1997). Economists, however, are plagued by doubts. They note that voting produces costs (such as information and transportation costs) and even if voting were costless, it
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-01909346-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Sebastian Garmann [email protected]
1
University of Bochum, Universitätsstraße, 150 Bochum, Germany
Garmann S.
could be in the interest of poorly informed voters to strategically abstain and leave political decision-taking to better-informed citizens (Feddersen and Pesendorfer 1996).1 In general, if turnout were inconsequential for policy outcomes, then, in the presence of voting costs, low turnout would be preferable from an efficiency perspective. Thus, whether high turnout should be welcomed depends on whether the level of turnout affects policy. Low turnout could affect policy if there exist interest groups (Adrian 1955; Lizzeri and Persico 2004), which may be over-represented in the electorate when general turnout is low. To the extent that policy is responsive to the composition of the electorate (Meltzer and Richard 1981), policies that target interest groups at the expense of the general society could be overprovided after low turnout elections, which in turn reduces overall welfare (Ball 1995). However, while this relationship between low turnout and interest group influence through participation bias at the polls seems intuitive, it is called into question in recent research by Hodler et al. (2015). While a high turnout may reduce participation bias, it may also reduce the average participant’s level of political knowledge,
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