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A Cross-national Comparative Study of the Policy Effects of Referendums
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4.6
Unemployment benefits (index unem2)
These rather disappointing results are slightly put into perspective when we turnto an analysis focusing on a more general measure of unemployment benefits.For this policy indicator we resort for our preference measure to the followingquestion from the Eurobarometer 56.1 of 2001:
Please say how much you agree or disagree with each of the fol-lowing statements?...The government should provide a decent stan-dard of living for the unemployed (1 Strongly agree - 5 Stronglydisagree)(Christensen, 2004)
We would again expect a negative effect for this variable on the unemployment
benefits. As the results reported in table 4.6 show, this is also largely the case. Inalmost all specifications we find a negative coefficient which almost reaches sta-tistical significance. We also find systematically negative, though statistically notsignificant, coefficients for our referendum indicator. And this independent of thecontrol variables or the chosen estimating technique. But while the interpretationfrom the results of simple linear regression is that in referendum countries un-employment benefits are lower, the results from the switching regression modelsuggest that the benefits follow more closely the voters’ preferences. For theeconomic, legal and political variables from Botero, Djankov, Porta, Lopez-De-Silanes and Shleifer (2004, 1367) we find no significant effect whatsoever.
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For the set of countries considered here we had to drop the variable for socialist legal origin,
since none of the countries covered by the Eurobarometer survey have socialist legal origins.
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| | Authors: Hug, Simon. and Gilland Lutz, Karin. |
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4.6
Unemployment benefits (index unem2)
These rather disappointing results are slightly put into perspective when we turn
to an analysis focusing on a more general measure of unemployment benefits.
For this policy indicator we resort for our preference measure to the following
question from the Eurobarometer 56.1 of 2001:
Please say how much you agree or disagree with each of the fol-
lowing statements?...The government should provide a decent stan-
dard of living for the unemployed (1 Strongly agree - 5 Strongly
disagree)(Christensen, 2004)
We would again expect a negative effect for this variable on the unemployment
benefits. As the results reported in table 4.6 show, this is also largely the case. In
almost all specifications we find a negative coefficient which almost reaches sta-
tistical significance. We also find systematically negative, though statistically not
significant, coefficients for our referendum indicator. And this independent of the
control variables or the chosen estimating technique. But while the interpretation
from the results of simple linear regression is that in referendum countries un-
employment benefits are lower, the results from the switching regression model
suggest that the benefits follow more closely the voters’ preferences. For the
economic, legal and political variables from Botero, Djankov, Porta, Lopez-De-
Silanes and Shleifer (2004, 1367) we find no significant effect whatsoever.
28
28
For the set of countries considered here we had to drop the variable for socialist legal origin,
since none of the countries covered by the Eurobarometer survey have socialist legal origins.
29
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