分权与责任心：选民在地方性选举中比在全国性选举中更警觉吗？

__ 2_5_Ws POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 2557 Decentralization and Voters in India are more vigilant in monitoring Accountability government at the local than at the national level. In state Are Voters More Vigilant in Local assembly elections voters reward incumbents for local than in National Elections? income growth, and punish them for a rise in inequality, Stuti Khemani over their entire term in office. But in national elections voters behave myopically, rewarding growth in national income and a fall in inflation and inequality only in the year preceding the election. The World Bank Development Research Group Public Economics February 2001  | POLiCY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 2557 Summary findings Defining vigilance as retrospective voting-where voters In state assembly elections voters reward incumbents evaluate incumbents on their performance during their for local income growth, and punish them for a rise in entire term in office-Khemani compares voter behavior inequality, over their entire term in office. But in in local and national elections to make inferences about national elections voters behave myopically, rewarding whether voters are more vigilant in monitoring growth in national income and a fall in inflation and government at the local level. Using data from 14 major inequality only in the year preceding the election. states in India over the period 1960-92, she contrasts The evidence is consistent with greater voter vigilance voters' behavior in state legislative assembly elections and government accountability in local than in national with their behavior in national legislative elections. elections. This paper-a product of Public Economics, Development Research Group, is part of a larger effort in the group to understand the role of decentralization in improving public service delivery. Copies of the paper are available free from the World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433. Please contact Hedy Sladovich, room MC2-609, telephone 202- 473 -7698, fax 202-522-1154, email address hsladovich@worldbank.org. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The author may be contacted at skhemani@worldbank.org. February 2001. (23 pages) The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Produced by the Policy Research Dissemination Center  Decentralization and Accountability: Are Voters More Vigilant in Local than in National Elections? Stuti Khemani I am grateful to Shantayanan Devarajan, Gunnar Eskeland, Dilip Mookherjee, and participants at the Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics, April 2000, for useful comments and suggestions. Correspondence may be sent via email to skhemani@worldbank.org   I. Introduction Traditional analyses of the appropriate degree of decentralization (Tiebout 1956 and Oates 1972) have emphasized the role of local governments in providing differentiated public goods in response to heterogeneous preferences. The arguments are usually based on competition across local jurisdictions, or informational advantages at more local levels. However recently, more explicit political economy analysis of incentives in the public sector (Besley and Coate 1999, Persson and Tabellini 2000, Seabright 1996) has placed political accountability at the crux of the debate on decentralization. An appealing argument in this vein is that citizens exert greater effort in monitoring government agencies when they are more local, and hence decentralization increases accountability by bringing government closer to the people (Devarajan, Eskeland and Zou 1999). One of the mechanisms by which a populace monitors government is the electoral mechanism. This paper compares voter behavior in local versus national elections to make inferences about the relative level of electoral accountability. We use data on votes cast for incumbent governments to analyze whether voters are more vigilant in local versus national elections. Specifically, we contrast the determinants of incumbent support in state legislative assembly elections in India with that in elections to the national legislature, over the period 1960-92, for 14 major states in the country. At the outset, we define what we mean by "vigilance" of voters and provide some support from political economy theory for why this may be a reasonable definition, given our immediate objective of comparing accountability of central and local governments. For our purposes, vigilant voters are retrospective voters who evaluate incumbents on the basis of their overall performance during the entire term in office. Hence, they are defined as the opposite of myopic voters who care only about outcomes immediately before elections. This definition is based upon a moral hazard model (as in Ferejohn 1986) where all politicians are of the same "type" (that is, there is no adverse selection) and the objective of the principals (the voters) is to choose a decision rule that maximizes their well-being subject to the constraint that political agents pursue their own self- interest. Ferejohn (1986) shows that one implication of this model is that voters should I  make their decision about reelection based on actual performance in office rather than on announced policy platforms. Therefore, our definition of vigilance is derived by extending the same idea to a setting where there are multiple periods between elections and voters need to provide incentives for good performance throughout the term in office. The goal of this paper is to study voting behavior in state and national elections in India to infer whether voters are more vigilant when evaluating incumbents at the more local level of government. It is important to immediately highlight that the approach used in this paper is only useful to compare the relative accountability of national and local governments in some form of a principal-agent model, because the argument for retrospective voting as desirable behavior that promotes electorate interests may be turned on its head when we consider adverse selection models where politicians are differentiated by competency levels. Alesina and Rosenthal (1995) show that if incumbents receive competency shocks that are persistent, then it may be perfectly rational for voters to ignore any observations of performance before the election year, since only the most recent observation contains information about the expected performance of the office-holder in the future. However, as long as there is some delay in learning about competence, or if it is persistent for more than one period, ever adverse selection models would predict that voters should consider past observations of performance in deciding which candidate would deliver the greatest well-being in the future. There exists a large empirical literature that tests whether the performance of the economy just before elections has a significant influence on the electoral fortunes of the president and his party in US elections, beginning with the provocative study of Kramer (1971). The motivation behind this body of work seems to be to identify the issues that matter to voters, whether income growth, unemployment, inflation, or ideological differences between the two main political parties. The general conclusion is that high income growth, and, to a lesser extent, low unemployment and inflation, just before elections has a significant positive effect on votes received by the incumbent president's party, a phenomenon that has been termed "economic retrospective voting" (Fiorina 1978). However, Stigler (1973) and Peltzman (1990) have pointed out that these studies 2  assume that voters behave myopically by only considering outcomes in the recent past, usually in just the year before elections. Instead, Peltzman (1990) proposes that an appropriate model to judge voting behavior should be similar to a principal-agent model of the stock market where the owner compensates a manager based on all available information from past performance. Our definition of vigilance corresponds exactly to one essential implication of this model, namely, that voters should consider economic information available for all periods since the previous election. Peltzman's results are consistent with voters using substantial macroeconomic inforrnation to evaluate the performance of the president's party. To the best of our knowledge, no empirical study undertakes a comparative analysis of voter behavior in national versus local elections. Although Peltzman (1992) does study voter response to fiscal policy in both presidential and gubernatorial elections, his focus is entirely on testing voter preferences with regard to growth in government budgets, assuming that the decisionmaking behavior is the same in both elections. He finds that voters penalize both federal and state spending growth, and make their decision by considering budget information for several periods before elections. Inferences based on his regressions suggest that there is no difference between voting behavior in US presidential and gubernatorial elections in terms of vigilance of voters. In his earlier study, Peltzman (1990) argues that macroeconomic conditions such as income growth, unemployment and inflation should only matter for presidential elections, and in senatorial or gubernatorial elections only as a signal to the president's party. His empirical analysis is consistent with this, although he does not explicitly test the effect of local economic conditions on gubernatorial votes. The discussion of the Peltzman papers on voting behavior brings us to an important limitation of using this approach to make inferences about relative electoral accountability at local and national levels. Since we study voting behavior within a given federal structure, that is, a system where local and national governments have distinct roles and responsibilities, we should expect rational voters to hold the different tiers responsible for different activities. Ideally, we would like to study the effect of shifting a particular responsibility from the national to the local level of government. Hence, it may 3  be that voters appear less vigilant in elections to a particular tier, but only because the activity they need to evaluate is more noisy, and not because they exert less effort in monitoring. For example, if national governments are only held responsible for general crisis management or foreign policy, then it may be that events just before elections will have a strong effect on votes. On the other hand, if local governments are held responsible for overall well-being, then voters may be more likely to consider performance throughout the term in office. Our empirical strategy focuses on studying voter responses to general economic well-being in both local and national elections, and we argue that this allows us to draw some conclusions regarding relative electoral accountability at local and national levels. The results of the analysis may be summarized as follows: in state assembly elections, voters in India reward incumbents for local income growth, and punish them for growth in inequality, over the entire term in office. However, in national elections voters behave myopically by rewarding growth in national income and fall in inflation only in the year immediately before elections. We conclude that the evidence is consistent with greater voter vigilance and government accountability in more local elections. The pattern of results shows that voters hold the national government responsible for national growth and local governments for local growth. National governments appear to be exclusively accountable for inflation, which may be expected from intelligent voters since monetary authority rests there.' Both tiers of government are rewarded for lowering inequality, but once again, voters in national elections place a disproportionate weight on reductions in inequality just before elections. Additional results with regard to spending and taxes at the state level suggest that voters are not swayed by increases in spending and fall in taxes just before elections. This once again confirms the conclusion that voters are vigilant in state elections, and consider performance throughout the term in office rather than being persuaded by short-term, manipulative policies just before elections. Similar analysis with fiscal variables at the national level has been difficult because of extreme multicollinearity problems, since I Although state governments have a role to play in determining the cost of living within their boundaries via restrictions on inter-sale trade of commodities. 4  national variables do not vary across states. With data on national spending at the state level it may be possible to draw more reliable conclusions, but this is not available at the current time. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section II describes the empirical strategy employed to test the hypotheses of relative voter vigilance; section III outlines the data and variables used in the analysis, and section IV reports the results of the estimation; section V provides further discussion about the reasoning behind the evidence, and then concludes. II. Empirical Strategy The empirical strategy consists of testing whether information from the incumbent's early years in office is a significant determinant of incumbent support, even after controlling for information available immediately prior to elections. The analysis primarily focuses on information related to changes in economic conditions, including economic growth, inflation, poverty, and income inequality. In estimating the effect of these variables, we control for several different socioeconomic and political factors that may have significant bearing on voting decisions. These include variables measuring the degree of political competition, political affiliation between the center and the state, and initial economic conditions, such as the proportion of rural population, and levels of state income, poverty and inequality. Some of these variables may be interpreted as influencing the proportion of partisan voters in the voting population. These are voters for whom the ideological position of candidates, whether based on party affiliation, religion, ethnicity, linguistics etc., matters more than their performance in delivering better economic conditions. In fact, a large number of voters are probably motivated by partisan considerations rather than by macroeconomic conditions. After controlling for these variables, our empirical estimation of the effect of economic conditions reflects the decision of the "marginal voter" (Peltzman 1990), that is, one who is indifferent between candidates or parties on ideological grounds, and votes based on economic information. S  The basic equations estimated are: (1) LOCAL - VOTEj, = a, + AL 1 ZT ECONi-2 + /8L ECONi,_I + YL Zt-l + L (T -1) Lit (2) NATN'L - VOTEit = ai N + T8N ) ET ECONi, 2 + 8N'ECON;,_ + rNZil-I +