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Published August 1, 2017 | Submitted
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Contestable Leaderships: Party Discipline and Vote Buying in Legislatures

Abstract

This paper examines the institutional determinants of discipline in legislative parties building on the premise that leaders need to maintain support within the organization to continue leading. Payments distributed by the incumbent on the spot increase the value of promises of future benefits by fostering individuals' perceived chances that the incumbent will retain her position. The main result of the paper shows, in fact, that the party leader can use promises of future benefits to induce members to vote for a position disliked by the majority of the party only if she also distributes benefits on the spot.

Additional Information

I am very grateful to David Levine, Andy Atkeson, Hal Cole, Christian Hellwig, Leeat Yariv and Juliana Bambaci for helpful discussions and suggestions. I am also thankful to numerous seminar participants at Caltech, Chicago, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Maryland, U. Penn, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCSD, and Washington University in St. Louis, as well as to many others at UCLA, for useful comments to previous versions of this paper.

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August 19, 2023
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