Anna Lo Prete (University of Torino)

Civic engagement and government spending: Lessons from global warming

Abstract. This article examines the relationship between civic engagement and government spending. We define civic engagement along three dimensions of citizens’ participation: in civil society associations; on e-government platforms; by voting at national elections. To exogenously varying the willingness of engaging, we assume that reactions to the environmental threat that global warming represents, differ across countries due to preferences for collectivism, attitudes for interacting behind a screen, geo-climate features. We consistently estimate that civil and electronic participation increase government spending, compatibly with the hypothesis that more participative societies are associated with more redistributive policies, while electoral participation decreases it, compatibly with a selection mechanism whereby the fraction of the electorate moved by the threat that global warming represents for the collectivity, distances themselves from political engagement through traditional electoral channels.

Joint with Agnese Sacchi.