Moderating Political Extremism: Single Round vs. Runoff Elections under Plurality Rule

By M. Bordignon, T. Nannicini, Guido Tabellini. Social Science Research Network, 2016

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We compare single round vs runoff elections under plurality rule, allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under runoff elections, the number of political candidates is larger, but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy and hence policy volatility are smaller, because the bargaining power of the political extremes is reduced compared to single round elections. The predictions on the number of candidates and on policy volatility are confirmed by evidence from a regression discontinuity design in Italy, where cities above 15,000 inhabitants elect the mayor with a runoff system, while those below hold single round elections.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d6a6c596cdbf57cccd1caece544bf7111ad0a61a

Citations in the corpus

• Decentralization and Local Governments' Performance: How Does Fiscal Autonomy Affect Spending Efficiency? (2012, unknown): “…functions (e.g., local police, cultural and sport services, economic development); moreover, they are subject to a runoff voting mechanism, that is likely to significantly influence political outcomes and subsequent policy choices (e.g., Osborne and Slivinsky, 1996; Bordignon and Tabellini, 2009).”
• Electoral rules and voter turnout (2011, unknown): “In particular, the dual ballot has been associated with greater fiscal prudence (see: Chamon et al., 2008; Bordignon et al., 2010).”