Electoral Incentives and Political Particularism : A Text Analysis Approach

Conventional wisdom describes the electoral connection as a do ut des whereby politicians distribute public goods to constituencies in exchange for votes. Applying computational text-analytic methods to a newly collected data set on Italian proposed legislation, I investigate parliamentarians’ behavior as a case study of how this causal mechanism works. The book shows the electoral connection binds parliamentarians to a heterogeneous set of interests, which leads them to distribute both public and private goods to their constituents. The results offer concrete insights to policymakers willing to reduce socially suboptimal phenomena such as clientelism and misallocation of public resources.