POLITRAITS · Politicians’ traits and public policies: learning how personal features influence fiscal outcomes

Politicians’ traits and public policies: learning how personal features influence fiscal outcomes

All over the globe, budgets and policies are set by political agents who are office-seekers. There is a growing literature in economics and political science that suggests that the individual characteristics of politicians -like their gender- may affect public policies. Politicians’ features shape their preferences and incentives, which, ultimately, may have an impact on policymaking. The “POLITRAITS” project seeks to contribute to the understanding of how the individual traits of politicians affect public policies. The focus of the project is on two understudied dimensions: the loyalty of politicians to the party line, and the education of politicians. These two dimensions are economically and politically relevant for the society. On the one hand, educated citizens are overrepresented among the political elite but we know very little about the implications for policies. On the other hand, party loyalty is now at record high levels in many countries and this has important economic and political consequences. In the U.S., for example, the increasing levels of polarization combined with strong partisan loyalty in the Congress are causing governmental dysfunction and the American political system is becoming highly inefficient. One of the studies of the POLITRAITS project examined theoretically and empirically the possibility that party leaders systematically use distributive spending to reward discipline within their party. Using data on party discipline in the U.S. House of Representatives the study finds that increases in legislators’ party discipline raise the amounts of discretionary spending their districts receive. Importantly, the rewards for discipline are larger the greater the gap between the constituents’ and party’s preferences (i.e., in conservative-leaning districts represented by Democrats or liberal-leaning districts represented by Republicans). In another study, the POLITRAITS project analysed whether the education of local politicians has an effect on governmental outcomes. While some recent studies argue that highly educated politicians perform better in government, others find no effects of education on governmental outcomes. This article addresses this controversy using a novel dataset with information about the education, age and gender of elected local politicians in Spain and fine-grained economic and fiscal data. The study provides causal evidence that in municipalities where the party with more educated councillors barely won the election, governments do not perform better on a number of valence indicators. However, further analyses reveal that local governments led by more educated politicians have lower levels of capital spending and receive less capital transfers per capita.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union