Policy in parliamentary versus congressional systems and other essays in political economics.

摘要

In the first essay of this dissertation I study the impact, on economic policy, of political institutions that differ between parliamentary and congressional systems. Specifically, I focus on the vote of confidence procedure as key in explaining the difference in welfare state structure and labor market regulations across countries. In the context of incomplete information, all representatives differ by policy preferences. Those whose preferences are closer to those of their voters have an incentive to signal this fact. The best way for representatives to do this is to propose "extreme" policies, policies that types who have unpopular preferences cannot profitably propose. The degree to which policies are extreme is dependent on each representative's desire to be confirmed and reach future periods and since a prime minister (who has monopoly power on policy proposals) can get a better deal in systems with a confidence procedure than systems without it, this incentive will be greater in parliamentary systems. The model predicts extreme "leftist" policies in a parliamentary than a congressional system when a left-wing government is in power while it predicts extreme "rightist" policies in the opposite case and this is compatible with empirical evidence.;In the second essay, I introduce a new way of thinking about lobbying. Lobbyists do not pay contributions and do not give politicians information about voters' preferences. On the contrary, lobbyists monitor representatives and transmit this information to voters: this gives them a leverage towards politicians who might have an incentive to hide their true preferences to voters. I also show that introducing lobbying does not alter the result significantly, except for the case in which monitors and voters are on the opposite side of the issue.;In the final essay, I study how rigid or flexible a constitution should be as a function of the cost of amending it versus the probability of success in replacing the constitution altogether. Results show that the degree of flexibility is increasing in the probability of success of a replacement while an increase in the cost of amending is ambiguous in general.