D72 - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting BehaviorReturn

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasize the importance of energy by making affordable and clean fuel access the focus of Goal 7. Energy poverty is a widespread issue globally, particularly in developing countries. Thus, this investigation inspects the drivers of energy poverty in Brazil using data from 1997Q1 to 2022Q4. The study introduces the wavelet Zivot-Andrews (WZA) unit root test, which modifies the traditional Zivot-Andrews (ZA) test by incorporating wavelet analysis, allowing decomposition of the time series into different time scales (short-term, medium-term and long-term). This enables the WZA test to capture structural breaks and unit roots more effectively across various time scales. In addition, the study employs wavelet quantile-on-quantile regression. The results show that across all quantiles and time scales, an increase in financial globalization and economic policy uncertainty increases energy poverty. The study also shows that female political participation increases energy poverty in the short and long term. In contrast, in the medium term and across all quantiles, female political participation decreases energy poverty. Lastly, an increase in financial development decreases energy poverty across all quantiles and periods. Based on these findings, policies are suggested.

Voters' ability to act upon the fulfilment of election pledges matters profoundly for democratic accountability. Existing literature provides evidence of retrospective voting on pledge fulfilment at the party level. This paper investigates retrospective voting on pledges at the level of individual politicians. It estimates the effect of breaking a pledge to support anti-corruption legislation on Czech deputies' preferential votes. Since the pledge was identical for all the participating de- puties and not all deputies pledged, the data permit estimation of the effect of pledge breakage independently of the effect of voting against anti-corruption bills. Results show that retrospective voting on pledges occurs even at the level of individual politicians when information about pledge fulfilment is easily accessible. Voters "punish" pledge breakage alone, i.e., they do not punish voting against anti-corruption bills if the politician has not pledged to act otherwise.

The paper synthesizes the current literature regarding information aggregation, voter compe-tence, voting paradox and behavioral economics in order to answer the question whether the phenomenon of "wisdom of the crowds" can be reasonably relied upon during a referendum. Review of the 'wisdom of the crowds' research reveals two key assumptions: voter competence and voter independence. Although direct testing of the actual fulfillment of these assumptions in a real-world setting is not possible, both empirical literature on voting behavior and rational choice theory provide ample ground for skepticism in this regard. Low level of knowledge together with unmitigated influence of systematic biases is expected to dominate the actual voting behavior. Affect heuristic is used as an example to illustrate this point. The paper concludes that referendum does not seem to be a reliable way to revealing preferences regarding various social issues.

Conditional Political Budget Cycle in the OECD Countries Examination of the so called political business cycle (i. e. macroeconomic cycle induced by the political cycle) provides little evidence in empirical studies. The empirical evidence of statistically signifi cant increase in the economic activity before election is especially a matter of less developer countries. There is a shift in focus to the examination of the political budget cycle in case of the developed economies. This paper examines the presence of conditional political budget cycle (PBC) in the OECD countries using data from all 34 member states over the period 1995- 2012. We suppose that the conditionality of the PBC depends on the credibility and transparency of the fi scal policy. The dynamic panel linear regression model is used in this article. Generalized method of moments (GMM) with instrumental variables (IV) is used for estimating arameters in this model. Three important results emerge: First, there is a PBC in the OECD countries. Second, the PBC in OECD countries strongly depends on credibility and transparency of fi scal policy. Third, the shape of the PBC in the OECD countries indicates that there is an immediate fi scal restriction after the elections.

This paper discusses recent claims made by Caplan (2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2002, 2007) who argues that democracies produce bad policies as a result of voters' irrational beliefs. We start by outlining the motives which led Caplan to amend classic Public Choice in such a radical fashion. We analyse the likely repercussions that his hypothesis might have on the future of the profession. We provide a critique of Caplan's distinction between experts and ordinary people and we conclude by suggesting an important degree of caution in interpreting Caplan's results and in providing any policy advice based on his hypothesis.

The command economy that the Czech Republic inherited from the communist system was considered unreformable. It seems as if the social and economic transition of ex-communist countries is necessary for their full inclusion among democratic countries with highly developed market economic systems. No new central European tiger has emerged since Erhard"s reform in the post-war West Germany, since welfare-statism also destroyed a genuine economic transition in the Czech Republic. Influential interest groups were able to interrupt the transition process and to stop it halfway in many areas. Political pressures to bring the Czech Republic closer to European Union's standards led to the passing of laws and government measures that were incompatible with the highly-regarded transition strategy. The development of public law at the expense of private law enforcement (in accordance with EU policy) led to the further expansion of bazaar capitalism in the Czech Republic.

The study is an empirical investigation of inflation convergence between CEFTA and EU countries. The question of both groups convergence as well as convergence of each individual countries within those groups is particularly discussed in the paper. Detailed analysis was carried out by use of panel estimation in the individual and in the time setup. The study reveals an unambiguous convergence of all CEFTA inflations towards the EU levels between 1993 and 2000.