No estábamos preparados. Nos enfrentamos a un shock de tal magnitud que nuestras estructuras sanitarias, financieras, fiscales e incluso mentales se encuentran ante graves dificultades para superar la situación generada por el Coronavirus-19. No hace falta decir que el principal problema que nos ha de ocupar actualmente es el sanitario, lo cual, eso sí, implica e implicará costes macroeconómicos causados por la paralización de la actividad productiva y de consumo (Baldwin, 2020). Ahora bien, las recomendaciones o, dada la elevada incertidumbre existente (Furman, 2020), las opiniones de los economistas pueden ser de utilidad en la medida en que los gobernantes necesitan saber, y a la población también le interesa saber, cuáles van a ser las consecuencias económicas de este shock.

We investigate whether corruption amplifies the political effects of economic crises. Using Spanish municipal-level data and a difference-in-difference strategy, we find that local unemployment shocks experienced during the Great Recession (2008-2015) increased political fragmentation. This effect was four times larger in municipalities exposed to malfeasance than in municipalities without a history of political corruption. We bolster this evidence by showing that, conditional on province and population-strata fixed effects, there is no evidence of differential pre-trends. We also find that the interaction of unemployment and corruption harms the two traditional main parties and benefits especially the new party on the left (Podemos).

We show that regional heterogeneity of underlying fundamentals (e.g. economic history, geography, natural resources, social capital) can lead to extreme voting in federations. When the outcome of federal policies { such as transfer schemes, market regulation, migration targets { depends on these fundamentals, the set of regions that benefits or loses from such a policy is fixed exogenously (for each given policy). This creates a strategic incentive for the median voter to elect extremely protective federal representatives, who will distort redistribution in favour of their constituency by influencing the choice of the policy magnitude. Interestingly, the benefits of selecting tough negotiators outweigh those of belonging to the ruling coalition. We test our predictions by looking at parties’ performances at national and European Parliament elections from 1990 onwards, and find that strategic voting is indeed Ushaped: winning and losing member states vote more extremely than those in the middle. Our online survey provides further evidence.

ONLINE – 14.30h

ONLINE – 14.30h

ONLINE – 14.30h