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The electoral costs of policy commitments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2018

Timm Betz
Timm Betz*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, 2102 Allen Building, 4348 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: timm.betz@tamu.edu
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Abstract

Existing arguments across political science posit that parties in government use domestic and international institutions to lock in their own policy preferences by tying the hands of successors. I demonstrate that these arguments contrast with the assumption of office-seeking parties and therefore portray an incomplete picture of the incentives of governments. The paper emphasizes the trade-off between implementing policy preferences, on the one hand, and exploiting partisan differences for electoral success, on the other hand: locking in a policy takes an issue off the table, but it also undermines a party’s ability to leverage differences to the opposition in elections. Because office-seeking parties need to take into account these electoral consequences, they have a disincentive to tie their successors’ hands. I advance this argument in the context of the establishment of independent central banks, provide empirical evidence, and suggest implications for the literature on international institutions.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 30 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2018 

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KSQ3NG
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