Shirk or Work? On How Legislators React to Monitoring

Does transparency affect the decision to shirk or work? The question is analyzed using the example of parliamentary voting. Without transparency, politicians have little incentive to attend all votes in parliament. But if voters have means to monitor their representatives' effort, incumbents face the trade-off between shirking and deteriorating reelection prospects the more votes they miss. A 2014 institutional change in the Swiss Upper House allows testing the theoretical prediction. The introduction of an electronic voting system involved individual decisions on several types of votes to be automatically published whereas all other votes remained secret to the public. Pre- and post-reform attendance during secret votes comes from video recordings of all sessions. This variation in monitoring depending exogenously on vote types allows identifying a causal effect of monitoring on shirking measured by attendance. Legislators shirk less once attendance is monitored. The effect is particularly strong among politicians for whom reelection is most valuable: incumbents aspiring for another term, full-time politicians who devoted themselves to a career in parliament, and legislators with few interest groups.