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Institution design and public good provision: an experimental study of the vote of confidence procedure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Chloe Tergiman
Chloe Tergiman*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia and NYU’s Center for Experimental and Social Sciences, Vancouver, Canada
*
chloejt@gmail.com
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Abstract

Parliamentary democracies use the vote of confidence procedure, which links the survival of a government with that of a bill, in order to discipline members of the majority. In this paper I investigate the role that the vote of confidence procedure has on public good provision and show that it has unintended negative consequences: even when efficient, public goods may be turned down in favor of earmarked projects. I use a laboratory experiment to test my model and show that the increase in voting cohesion comes at the cost of a 23 % reduction in public good provision and more unequal earmarking.

Keywords

Multilateral legislative bargainingVote of confidence procedureProposer power
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 697 - 717
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9423-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Appendix 1-7
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