Majority voting is considered an efficient information aggregation mechanism in committee decision-making. We examine if this holds in environments where voters first need to acquire information from sources of varied quality and cost. In such environments, efficiency may depend on free-riding...

In this survey, we investigate the general mechanisms underlying the political economy of attention and review their empirical relevance, in particular for electoral accountability. The focus is on exogenous or stimulus-driven attention that political actors try to win or divert when pursuing...

We study the strategic interaction between candidates to office and the print media, exploring the following tension: while the media is instrumental for candidates to communicate with voters, candidates and media outlets have conflicting preferences over the contents of media reporting. We...

Guay and Johnston (2022) examine asymmetric politically motivated reasoning on the part of liberals and conservaites. In our replication of the paper we examine four potential issues with the analysis: confounding in the numeracy task, heterogeneity across ideological constraints, the use of...

In this paper, we study if exposure to the institutions of trade partners changes individuals' attitudes towards democracy and favors the process of democratization. We combine survey data with country-level measures of democracy from 1960 to 2015, and exploit the improvement in air, relative to...

From a theoretical standpoint, there are reasons to believe that political competition and political participation might have opposite effects on the size of government. We investigate empirically this possibility using data from a panel of 104 countries from 1960. We find that reforms enhancing...

"While figures like George Soros, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are known for their hefty political donations, few Americans have heard of Arabella Advisors. Even more powerful than these standalone billionaires, Arabella is a secretive "dark money" operation that channels megadonor funds into...

Over the past decade, social media platforms have emerged as prominent vehicles for displaying dissent. In response, various actors have increasingly spread fake news on these platforms to impair the opposition--the (dis)information war. We analyze a methodology to identify disinformation using...

We study the distribution of political speech across U.S. firms. We develop a measure of political engagement based on firms' communications (earnings calls, regulatory filings, and social media), by training a large language model to identify statements that contain political opinions. Using...

This first edition of the OECD Anti-Corruption and Integrity Outlook analyses Member countries’ efforts to uphold integrity and fight corruption. Based on data from the Public Integrity Indicators, it analyses the performance of countries’ integrity frameworks, and explores how some of the...

A key idea in political economy is that policy is often tailored to voters who are not ideologically attached - swing voters. We show, however, that in political environments where political parties can use repression and violence to exclude voters from elections, they may optimally target the...

Does media bias affect voting? We address this question by looking at the entry of Fox News in cable markets and its impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000, the conservative Fox News Channel was introduced in the cable programming of 20 percent of US towns. Fox News...

Economists have long concerned themselves with environmental influences, such as neighborhood, peers and family on individuals' beliefs and behaviors. However, the impact of children on parents' behavior has been little studied. Parenting daughters, psychologists have shown, increases feminist...

It's time for a radical overhaul of state-funded charitiesNew research, released today, reveals the true extent of government funded lobbying by charities and pressure groups.This report argues that, when government funds the lobbying of itself, it is subverting democracy and debasing the...

Using a natural voting experiment in Switzerland that encompasses a 160-year period (1848–2009), we investigate whether a higher level of complexity leads to increased reliance on expert knowledge. We find that when more referenda are held on the same day, constituents are more likely to refer...

This paper examines whether schooling has a positive impact on individual's political interest, voting turnout, democratic values, political involvement and political group membership, using the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). Between 1949 and 1969 the number of compulsory years of...

This paper studies the relationship between fiscal decentralization and electoral accountability, by analyzing how decentralization impacts upon incentive and selection effects, and thus on voter welfare. The model abstracts from features such as public good spillovers or economies of scale, so...

Grundlagen der Demokratie und des politischen Systems der Schweiz -- Föderalismus und direktdemokratische Entscheidungsfindung -- Das Sozial- und Gesundheitswesen im Spannungsfeld von Staat und Markt -- Sozial- und Gesundheitspolitik im Zeichen der Sozialversicherungen -- Die schweizerische...

Using newly digitized data on the growth of the telegraph network in America during 1840-1852, the paper studies the impacts of the electric telegraph on national elections. I use proximity to daily newspapers with telegraphic connections to Washington to generate plausibly exogenous variation...

This paper investigates the determinants of political polarization, a phenomenon of increasing relevance in Western democracies. How much of polarization is driven by divergence in the ideologies of politicians? How much is instead the result of changes in the capacity of parties to control...

In a world of increasing complexity, politicians have only limited information about the relationship of policies and the outcomes. They often make use of simplified heuristics, i.e. policy beliefs. Hence, an influence opportunity for interest groups occurs: informational lobbying. It...

Introduction -- The regulation of advertising -- The volume and content of political advertising -- The challenge of online advertising -- How ads are created and tested -- Buying and targeting political advertising on television -- Studying the persuasive effects of advertising -- Beyond...

Introduction -- The regulation of advertising -- The volume and content of political advertising -- The challenge of online advertising -- How ads are created and tested -- Buying and targeting political advertising on television -- Studying the persuasive effects of advertising -- Beyond...

This paper investigates the determinants of political polarization, a phenomenon of increasing relevance in Western democracies. How much of polarization is driven by divergence in the ideologies of politicians? How much is instead the result of changes in the capacity of parties to control...

Asymmetric information between voters and legislative representatives poses a major challenge to the functioning of representative democracy. We examine whether representatives are more likely to serve long-term campaign donors instead of constituents during times of low media attention to...

We investigate the existence of an "electoral cycle bias" in the timing of media coverage of news with high political value. In particular, we analyze how the electoral cycles at the regional level influence the coverage of news about corruption scandals in the Italian Regional Health Systems by...

This paper investigates the determinants of political polarization, a phenomenon of increasing relevance in Western democracies. How much of polarization is driven by divergence in the ideologies of politicians? How much is instead the result of changes in the capacity of parties to control...

Das Handbuch bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über die Grundlagen, Rahmenbedingungen, Einsatzfelder, Instrumente und Maßnahmen des Public-Affairs-Managements. Es vermittelt grundlegendes Know-how über die Funktionsweisen, Potenziale und auch Risiken strategischer Kommunikation, die auf das...

In this paper, we take up the burgeoning debate about the underrepresentation of the working class in politics. In the literature section we discuss theories of group representation and look at recent empirical studies of responsiveness that have begun to disaggregate public opinion by...

Public investment, for instance in infrastructure, has been constantly decreasing for four decades. New research by RWI for 13 OECD-countries shows: this development significantly correlates with population aging. Senior citizens do not value future payoffs of infrastructure projects and other...