Article Summaries

Sourav Sinha
Term Length and Political Performance

In this paper the authors examine the effects of duration of legislative terms on performance of legislators.
They exploit a natural experiment in the House of Representatives in Argentina, where there was a random
assignment of legislators across two and four year terms in 1983. Using six objective measures of legislator
performance, namely (1) attendance to floor sessions, (2) number of floor speeches, (3) attendance to committee
sessions, (4) number of bills introduced, (6) number of bills passed as law during the first two years of legislative
activity, they show that higher term lengths increase legislative performance. A first explanation would be a
direct impact through an immediate frustration effect on legislators assigned to a shorter term. However, the
authors find no evidence for such effects. A second explanation could be the negative effect on performance
induced by the requirements of campaigning for reelection in the second year for shorter-term legislators. This
could be detected by a widening of performance differential between two and four year term legislators in the
second year when campaigning begins and also for legislators from constituencies farther from Buenos Aires, the
seat of Congress. The authors find no evidence in support of either of these possibilities. A third explanation is
that legislators faced with longer terms make costly investments in the form of better performance, especially
since policies have higher gestation times in Argentina and reelection rates are low. Furthermore, electorally safer
legislators are more likely to make less costly investments and therefore exhibit lower performance relative to
their riskier counterparts faced with the same four year term lengths. The authors find conclusive evidence on
both these counts, thus establishing the impact of time horizon. To check for external validity of their results,
they identify a second natural experiment seventeen years later in the Argentinian Senate, where legislators
were randomly assigned to two, four and six year terms. Their results broadly sits with the notion that longer
terms enhance legislative performance. They find stronger evidence for their time-horizon hypothesis against
campaigning hypothesis, when they compare performance across legislators allotted to four and six year terms
during the first two years in office, when nobody is distracted by campaigning. Lastly they do not find any
evidence that longer terms have less of an effect on legislators with previous experience. This paper highlights
limitations to classical theories of electoral discipline that predict better performance by politicians with shorter
terms by a de facto increase in electoral accountability.
Electoral Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from the Audits of Local Governments
In this paper, the authors examine the role of electoral accountability on reigning in corruption in local
governments in Brazil. They hypothesize that reelection incentives would lead to less corruption among first
term mayors, than second term mayors who cannot campaign for a third consecutive term. They find that
in municipalities where mayors are in their first term, the share of stolen resources is 27% lower than in
municipalities with second-term mayors. To account for unobserved municipal level confounders which could
simultaneously affect corruption and reelection, the authors look at elections where the incumbent lost or won
marginally. Their initial hypothesis of reelection incentives driving down corruption are robust to a regression
discontinuity approach to this quasi-random assignment of mayors across first and second terms. If ability to
get reelected and corruption are positive correlated, then the previous estimation strategies would overestimate
effects of reelection incentives. To test for this possibility when the authors compare corruption records of secondterm mayors and first-term mayors who later get reelected, their results remain unchanged. Further, if experience
drives corruption then mayors in their first term with previous political experience would have similar corruption
levels as their second-term counterparts. The authors find no change in their initial results even after controlling
for past experience of first-term mayors. Their results are invariant to alternative specification of corruption on
counts that are less visible to voters. These results can be attributed to the fact that possibility of reelection
induces candidates to act diligently, lest their acts of corruption become public. This is consistent with evidence
that suggests that electoral accountability is more effective at reducing corruption in municipalities with more
vigilant media and judiciary. These results have important policy implications in establishing the role of audits
and information dissemination on reducing rent seeking and corruption among entrusted representatives.