Social Capital and Political Accountability

By T. Nannicini, Andréa Stella, Guido Tabellini, U. Troiano. 2010

337 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we empirically investigate a channel through which social capital may improve economic wellbeing and the functioning of institutions: political accountability. The main idea is that voters who share norms of generalized morality demand higher standards of behavior on their elected representavtives, are more willing to bear the cost of acquiring information, and are more likely to base their vote on criteria of social welfare rather than (narrow) personal interest. We take this conjecture to the data using information on the Italian members of Parliament in the postwar period (1948-2001). The empirical evidence shows that the electoral punishment of political misbehavior is considerably larger in electoral districts with high social capital, where social capital is measured by blood donation, and political misbehavior refers to receiving a request of criminal prosecution or shirking in parliamentary activity. Accordingly, episodes of political misbehavior are less frequent in electoral districts with high social capital.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d456685746543d8fb2cf5644473727c876daf927

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Citations in the corpus

Regression Discontinuity Designs Based on Population Thresholds: Pitfalls and Solutions (2015, methodology): “The measures we use (the number of nonprofit organizations per person and the rate of blood donations) are commonly used in the literature as measures of social capital; see Nannicini et al. (2013).”
Do Fiscal Rules Matter (2016, background): “…the 95 percent confidence interval. dimension here because Italian geography is correlated with economic development, crime rates, and shirking (e.g., see Ichino and Maggi 2000; Nannicini et al. 2013; Casaburi and Troiano 2016), and it could thus be associated with opportunistic manipulation too.”
Ghost-House Busters: The Electoral Response to a Large Anti Tax Evasion Program (2016, neutral): “In addition, a recent wave of randomized experiments shows that information provision can significantly affect voter choices and political outcomes (for a review, see Pande (2011)).”
Climate Risk, Cooperation and the Co-Evolution of Culture and Institutions (2017, background): “A recurrent finding in this literature is the strong complementarity between the quality of political institutions and norms of cooperation, which has been studied both theoretically and empirically (Tabellini, 2008; 2010; Nannicini et al., 2013; Padró i Miquel et al., 2015; Guiso et al., 2016; Grei”
Political Budget Cycles: Evidence from Italian Cities (2017, neutral): “In fact, given the large share of wealth held by Italians in real estate, it was a major policy issue.”
Trust, Growth and Well-Being: New Evidence and Policy Implications (2013, neutral): “Nannicini et al. (2013) convincingly test the prediction of their model by using cross-district variation in the criminal prosecution of members of the Parliament 46 in Italy.”