QoG lunchseminarium med Anders Woller Nielsen

Seminarium

The QoG Institute regularly organizes seminars related to research on Quality of Government. The seminars address the theoretical and empirical problem of how political institutions of high quality can be created and maintained as well as the effects of Quality of Government on a number of policy areas, such as health, the environment, social policy, and poverty.

Speakers are invited from the international research community and experts from NGOs and other organizations to the lunch seminars. The seminars last for one hour and include a short presentation by the speaker (30-35 min) followed by a joint discussion about the topic.

If nothing else is indicated, the seminars are held in English.

Title: Talk of the Home Town - The Russian State Duma as a Channel for Local, Distributive Preferences

Abstract: Studying original data on the population of speeches in the Russian State Duma from 1993 to present day, this paper argues that floor speeches -- symbolic acts with little legislative consequence -- function as a means for the ruling elite to obtain credible information on the distributive preferences of local areas. This is particularly the case when the electoral system incentivizes deputies to cultivate a regional constituency. The Russian mixed electoral system is an ideal test ground. Addressing the risk of deputies sorting into electoral system, two original causal identification strategies are presented. First, deputy behavior is studied immediately prior to and after a 2005 reform abandoning all majoritarian districts, acting as a shock to the incentives of majoritarian deputies. Second, double inclusion -- allowing candidates to run on both lists simultaneously -- introduces as-if random variation in electoral incentives for candidates marginally elected on one list only.