Social Identity and Electoral Accountability
In a laboratory experiment, we explore the effects of group identities on the principal-agent relationship between voters and representatives. In an adverse selection framework with observable effort, voters can choose to condition their reelection choices on representatives' effort alone, beli...
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| Published in: | American journal of political science Vol. 59; no. 3; pp. 671 - 689 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
01-07-2015
Wiley Subscription Services, Inc |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | In a laboratory experiment, we explore the effects of group identities on the principal-agent relationship between voters and representatives. In an adverse selection framework with observable effort, voters can choose to condition their reelection choices on representatives' effort alone, beliefs about representatives' competence, or both of those jointly. We show that inducing social identities increases the weight of representatives' effort in voters' reelection decisions. Further, when voters and representatives share a social identity, representatives tend to invest less effort and their effort is independent of their competence. In contrast, "out-group" representatives compensate for lower competence with higher effort and reduce effort when voters are likely to perceive them as competent. Voters often adopt laxer retention standards for representatives who are fellow group members and are responsive to evidence of other-regardingness from out-group representatives, but some voters actively resist treating representatives with shared identity more favorably and "overcorrect" as a consequence. |
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| Bibliography: | istex:F34DE9ED9653B2F1569C4A74DBF97E1080B60B7B ark:/67375/WNG-RVNDFJMD-7 ArticleID:AJPS12128 C Model of in-group biased behavior D Robustness of average treatment effects - ROC-analysis of retention decisions of type ω. E Examples and robustness of the group bias measure - Examples of four subjects illustrating the construction of the group bias measure - Evidence of robustness of the bias measure to idiosyncrasies of particular observations, non-randomness of observed choices, and consistency of the bias measure with observed retention choices. - ROC-analysis of retention choices as a function of type ω and choice 1. - Estimation of predicted probabilities of retention by bias as a function of type ω and choice 1. F Robustness of findings: motivational rationales for behavioral bias - Further evidence ruling out alternative explanations for the observed biases G Robustness of bias measure to role-switch - Further evidence from voters' retention decisions that behavior before and after the role-switch remains the same H Exit-survey - Subjects self-reports on the strategies they employed I Experimental design - Basic information on laboratory and software-Instructions http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/ajps . The research presented in this article was supported by NSF Grant #0819545. The authors thank Eric Dickson, Sanford Gordon, Catherine Hafer, Rebecca Morton, David Siegel, Dustin Tingley, Guillaume Frechette, Anja Neundorf, and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. We thank Anwar Ruff for technical assistance and programming. Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the 5th Annual NYU‐CESS Experiments in Political Science Conference, March 2012, New York NY; the MPSA 70th Annual Conference, April 2012, Chicago, IL; the European Political Science Association Annual Conference, June 2012, Berlin, Germany; the European Economic Science Association Conference, September 2012, Cologne, Germany; the North American Economic Science Association Conference, November 2012, Tucson, AZ; and Hebrew University, October 2013, Jerusalem, Israel.The data used in this study and replication files are available in the AJPS Data Archive on Dataverse ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
| ISSN: | 0092-5853 1540-5907 |
| DOI: | 10.1111/ajps.12128 |