Suchergebnisse

Drawing on Alchian's and Schumpeter's theories about the market selection of entrepreneurs and on theories of the political class, we focus on the features characterizing the Italian post-war democratic Parliament, from 1946 to 2010. We analyse the survival of the members of the Italian Parliament, taking into account all available information concerning their individual characteristics and political affiliation. We apply the stratified Cox model, taking into consideration the order of re-election of the 15,357 repeated observations (representing 7,127 members of the Italian Parliament since 1946), who are followed as if they were "patients" in order to study their parliamentary survival.

We study the determinants of governments and legislatures' survival in Italy from the unification to the end of the I Republic (1861-1994) - excluding the fascist period and the subsequent transitory institutional period, "Constituente" (1946-1948). We test whether institutional features such as electoral systems, form of State and extent of suffrage had any effect on the survival of legislatures and governments. We control for voting power of the parliamentary groups, number of parties represented in the parliament and size of the representative bodies. Unlike the political economy wisdom, we show that, over the whole period, governments and legislatures' survivals are inversely related to the plurality electoral system. The restricted suffrage and a high voting power of the leading parties reduce the risk of anticipated end of governments. The survival of the legislatures is related to the form of state (republic) and to the voting power of the leading party.

On the basis of a unique dataset referring to all 8,100 Italian municipalities and providing details of their balance-sheets, local governments' features, socio-demographic and economic indicators, we analyze the determinants of the local cultural expenditures. We exploit the panel nature of the data to explain observable and unobservable heterogeneity. Other than the traditional determinants, we find that per capita cultural expenditures increase with the population size, but decrease with the share of men over total population; immigrants increase local cultural spending only in the long run. The number of years in power of the municipal council also plays a role.

The literature on corruption makes unclear predictions on the relations between subsidiarity principle, according to which public decisions should be done at the lowest level government possible, & corruption of public officials. In this paper, we compare two alternative regimes, centralized vs decentralized, for the public co-financing of private projects. We show that, in the absence of corruption, the two regimes give the same results. Borrowing from the Chamberlin's analysis of monopolistic competition & from the rent-seeking literature, we introduce corruption in the model as a selling cost for the private suppliers. We show that a centralized regime causes higher corruption levels because of the higher number of private suppliers of competing projects. As a result, a central government tends to have a higher level of public capital expenditure than two (equally corruptible) regional governments. 3 Appendixes, 32 References. Adapted from the source document.