Trust in politicians can influence government turnover, economic and government performance as well as the demand side of policy-making - voters' preferences over policies. In this paper I study how a lack of trust in politicians influences the supply side - policy provision.
- Speaker
- Date
- Thursday 17 Nov 2022, 12:00 - 13:00
- Type
- Seminar
- Room
- Kitchen/Lounge E1
- Building
- E Building
Using data on 63,000 legislative documents, 75,000 individual roll-call voting decisions as well as survey evidence for more than 2,000 candidates in German federal elections between 2009 and 2022, I show that low political trust leads politicians to be less concerned with the provision of many types of public goods - most importantly climate protection.
In order to establish causality of these results, I follow an instrumental variable approach. My instrument functions similar to a shift-share instrument and leverages variation in internal migration patterns and differential exposure to common state-level shocks to political trust.
An analysis of the underlying mechanism suggests that the results are mostly driven by the selection of different politicians rather than pandering to voters' preferences.
Registration
To participate, please send an email to ae-secr@ese.eur.nl
