Saturday, November 28, 2009

The Influence of Economics on Politics


Economic crisis is typically bad for the incumbent - there is now some evidence that this is even the case in Ukraine.

"Our findings indicate that, even in a flawed `electoralist' democracy such as Ukraine, repeated parliamentary elections do serve as a mechanism of accountability with respect to economic performance. Disregarding electoral format, political control tends to work through political parties/partisan blocs. Only in the case of single-member district elections, however, is there a statistically significant relationship between economic performance and chances of winning, i.e. when economic performance is poor, voters punish legislators from a pro-presidential groupand reward legislators from the opposition."


This is good news as it gives incentives to politicians to care about their electorate -given the behavior of Ukrainian politicians, one might wonder however whether this incentives is powerful enough...

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