We study how the threshold of representation – the vote-share cutoff that determines whether a candidate wins office or not – shapes politicians’ legislative activities and reelection campaigns. Using newly digitized records of historical campaign spending and legislative committee meetings from Japan, we construct a new dataset capturing fine-grained information on how legislators allocate resources across different campaign technologies, and how they allocate their time across different activities in parliament. Our identification strategy uses a difference-in-differences design to exploit court-induced changes in district magnitude that raise the threshold of representation in certain districts while lowering it in others. Overall, our results show that lower thresholds of representation reduce legislators’ parliamentary and campaign activities. We discuss different theoretical mechanisms and disentangle whether the changes in legislator behavior are driven by electoral selection, incentives, or experience. Low thresholds of representation induce legislators to participate in fewer committee meetings and work on a smaller number of policy issues, and this effect appears to be driven mainly by electoral selection. Moreover, lower thresholds of representation induce legislators to reduce their spending on reelection campaigns— especially on expenditures tied to geographical locations such as rented facilities—and this effect appears to be driven by electoral incentives  

Date : 18 novembre 2022, 15h 

Lieu : HEC, Édifice Côte-Sainte-Catherine, la salle Investissement Québec, 3000, ch. de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Montréal