We investigate the role of political favouritism in the private education market. Using constituency-level panel data and a close-election regression discontinuity design, we estimate the causal effect of having a politician aligned with the state ruling party on the growth of private...

Do changes in public infrastructure impact voter turnout? After reunification numerous high schools have been closed in East Germany. Difference-in-differences estimations show that high school closures between 1992 and 2010 triggered a decline in voter turnout in the following state election,...

This paper sheds light on a neglected reason for women's underrepresentation in politics: crisis-induced gender gaps in incumbents' reelection with lasting negative effects on female representation. We use hand-collected data on 173,339 candidates in open-list local council elections (1997-2021)...

Climate policies can have adverse social and economic effects on affected citizens. Against this backdrop, understanding the conditions under which electoral support or backlash to such policies occurs is crucial. In this paper, I set out to shed light on this issue by empirically analysing the...

We examine whether and how the educational background of political leaders matters for policy choices and outcomes. Using data on municipalities in Brazil from 2000-2008, we estimate the effects of electing a more educated leader in a regression-discontinuity design whereby policy inputs and...

We study whether the arrival of a new immigrant wave changes natives' acceptance of former immigrants and their descendants. We exploit the 2015 European refugee crisis and the context of German open-list local council elections where voting for immigrant-origin candidates represents a...

We investigate whether term limits can help historically underrepresented groups, such as women, gain faster access to positions of political power. We exploit evidence from Italian local elections where, in a context of rapidly increasing women's presence in politics, mayoral term limits were...

In this paper, we study whether local spending of intergovernmental grants is influenced by mayoral elections in the grant receiving municipality. We exploit the implementation of the German federal government’s second economic stimulus package of 2009 (K2) in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg...

We estimate the effect of winning a mayoral election on long-run licit earnings, which plays a key role in the selection of local political leaders. We use Italian administrative social security data from 1995 to 2017 and a sharp regression discontinuity design based on close elections. Over a...

We study the effect of economic insecurity on electoral outcomes using data on municipal elections in Italy. We implement a difference-in-differences approach that exploits exogenous variation across municipalities in the share of inactive workers due to the economic lockdown introduced by the...

This paper explores the electoral effects of providing information on the educational outcomes of municipal schools when the mayor is running for reelection. We designed and implemented an experiment in Chile whereby we sent 128,033 letters to voters in 400 randomly selected polling stations....

This research investigates the intricate relationship between government spending and election outcomes in Zamboanga Peninsula (Region IX), Philippines, with a particular focus on the pervasive phenomenon of pork barrel politics. Employing a rigorous empirical approach, this paper analyzes...

Staggered difference-in-differences designs are pervasive in policy evaluations but little is known about the mechanisms of policy diffusion: How and why do such policies spread across jurisdictions? In this study, we highlight the role of elections in policy diffusion in settings where...

Staggered difference-in-differences designs are pervasive in policy evaluations but little is known about the mechanisms of policy diffusion: How and why do such policies spread across jurisdictions? In this study, we highlight the role of elections in policy diffusion in settings where...

In the 2022 local administrative council elections, as in earlier local and parliamentary elections, the Baath Party maintained its dominant role. It put up a large number of Baathist candidates for the purpose of propaganda, organised the electoral process and controlled the results....

Staggered difference-in-differences designs are pervasive in policy evaluations but little is known about the mechanisms of policy diffusion: How and why do such policies spread across jurisdictions? In this study, we highlight the role of elections in policy diffusion in settings where...

We study the effect of economic insecurity on electoral outcomes using data on municipal elections in Italy. We implement a difference-in-differences approach that exploits exogenous variation across municipalities in the share of inactive workers due to the economic lockdown introduced by the...

Using thirty years of municipal elections in France, we show that election results affect the share of immigrants across municipalities. In municipalities where a left- instead of right-wing mayor has been elected, the share of immigrants in the population grows faster by 1.5 p.p. within six...

We estimate the effect of winning a mayoral election on long-run licit earnings, which plays a key role in the selection of local political leaders. We use Italian administrative social security data from 1995 to 2017 and a sharp regression discontinuity design based on close elections. Over a...

In many countries, local governments struggle with inefficiency and corruption, often perpetuated by entrenched elites. This paper explores how leadership changes affect local bureaucratic performance. Combining personnel and citizen surveys with a regression discontinuity design in a large...

Many countries have adopted decentralization policies in order to strengthen democratic governance. Nevertheless, empirical literature on whether decentralization actually strengthens democratic governance is relatively limited when compared to empirical literature on the impact of...

This work contributes to the literature that estimates racial and gender imbalances in Brazilian municipal political representation. For this, we use data from the 2016 and 2020 mayoral and councilor elections in order to investigate the extent to which black women, black men and white women are...

Do female candidates give up running for office more easily than their male counterparts? Do males and females react in the same way to an electoral setback? If not, what explains that differences? A large body of literature in political science has shown that males are more likely to run for...

Can local elections introduced in a post-conflict context help to foster societal peace, or do they create new potential for conflict? The value of post-conflict elections has been the matter of controversial academic debates. However, this literature largely neglects to take into account the...

This paper investigates the patterns of Minority representation and voter registration in U.S. municipal governments. For the period 1981-2020, we report substantial levels of strategic underrepresentation of African American, Asian, and Latino voters in U.S. local politics. Disproportionality...

Purpose - This paper aims to identify the impact of Clans and parties on mobilizing and guiding voters in the municipal elections in Palestine, from the point of view of Municipal Council members, especially the municipal elections in Hebron governorate for 2005 and 2017. The Palestinian society...

This paper studies the impact of politicians' education on policy choices and public finance. A probabilistic voting model with candidates' education level and public expenditure decomposition is used to explain how politician's education matters for policy decisions over public budget...