This paper examines the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which lifted bans on independent expenditures by corporations and unions. Using a difference-in-differences design, the study compares states with and without pre-existing bans, focusing on gubernatorial elections. The...

This document is a follow up to the paper by Ahmed and Pesaran (2020, AP) and reports state-level forecasts for the 2024 US presidential election. It updates the 3,107 county level data used by AP and uses the same machine learning techniques as before to select the variables used in forecasting...

This paper examines the impact of regional development on democracy building in the Czech Republic following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the autocratic communist regime in 1989. By exploiting the variation in regional development arising from the economic transition process, we identify...

When does organized crime resort to assassinating politicians? In narcocracies, criminal groups co-opt political elites through bribery in exchange for protection to traffic illegal drugs. When criminal groups compete, they may also resort to political violence to influence which candidate wins...

This paper examines the impact of the large structural shocks - automation and import competition - on voter turnout during US federal elections from 2000 to 2016. Although the negative income effect of both shocks is comparable, we find that political participation decreases significantly in...

The problem of finding the factors influencing voting behavior is of crucial interest in political science and is frequently analyzed in books and articles. But there are not so many studies whose supporting information comes from official registers. This work uses official vote records in Spain...

The expansion of wind power has the potential to make a major contribution to the mitigation of climate change. While wind power generates positive externalities at the global level by reducing carbon dioxide, it also generates negative externalities at the local level, such as noise pollution...

Racist attacks and incidents frequently spark anti-racist protest campaigns. This research examines the effect of such mobilization on voting behavior in subsequent national and European elections. We focus on two periods of anti-racist demonstra-tions in Germany that followed 1) the killing of...

Recently, the notion of left-behind places and regions has gained ground in academic debates on regional inequality and changing electoral landscapes. This paper proposes an approach to conceptualising and measuring regional "left-behindness" in three Central Eastern European countries that goes...

In this paper, we unveil targeted repression against journalists as an elaborate strategy used by modern autocrats to mitigate the risk of mass protests during autocratic elections-a common threat to their rule. Repression is deployed to discipline the media before elections to secure favorable...

The concept of the Condorcet winner has become central to most electoral models in the political economy literature. A Condorcet winner is the alternative preferred by a plurality in every pairwise competition; the notion of a k-winner generalizes that of a Condorcet winner. The k-winner is the...

We exploit education reforms in Sweden and other European countries to estimate the causal effects of longer and modernized compulsory education on civic engagement. In most countries, compulsory education was extended by 1-2 years, and the curricula were reformed to better foster democratic and...

The literature on political socialization highlights the importance of parents and friends, but it is rare to find studies analyzing these socializing agents in the same model. In contrast, friends are often limited to one or a few friends that may not account for the actual effect of friends....

Does electing female politicians increase women’s political representation? Using a difference-in-differences design on a comprehensive cross-national dataset, we find that the first election of a female incumbent systematically increases the share of women in government. To address selection...

An extension rule assigns to each fractional tournament x (specifying, for every pair of social alternatives a and b, the proportion xab of voters who prefer a to b) a random choice function y (specifying a collective choice probability distribution for each subset of alternatives), which...

This report compiles our recent comment on Ahmed, Hodler, and Islam (2024, AHI-2024) and our response to the authors' reply to our comment. Our report is one element in a concerted forensic reproduction of studies based on data collected by GDRI, a Bangladesh-based survey company. We appreciate...

This paper examines the short- to long-term effects of large-scale refugee inflows on labour markets and anti-asylum attitudes. Using the exogenous arrival of Yugoslav refugees to Switzerland in the 1990s and municipal-level data with an instrumental variables strategy, we find that refugee...

Using a novel dataset in a difference-in-differences framework, I study the political implications of the change in policies protecting drought-impacted communities in Tunisia in 3088 districts. In 2016, the Tunisian government had drastically reduced support to farmers affected by droughts. I...

We study how preferences for migration-related narratives differ between private and public contexts and how social media fuel opinion polarization. Using a German representative sample (n=1,226), we found that individuals, especially from the left and center, avoided publicly endorsing...

We study the electoral repercussions of the L'Aquila earthquake in 2009, one of Italy's most catastrophic post-WWII seismic events. We construct a unique municipality-level dataset, combining high-resolution data on the ground acceleration recorded during the earthquake with European election...

We study how occupation-related material interest affects environmental voting. Specifically, material interest hinges on the greenness vs. brownness of individual occupational profiles. That is, on the extent to which individuals are expected to benefit vs. lose in a greener economy. We employ...

In an election, protest voters signal their discontent with the party they traditionally support in different ways. This paper examines a specific form of protest voting in which voters choose an anti-mainstream party over their true first preference, the mainstream party, as a way to signal...

The transition to a renewable heating system poses extraordinary policy challenges to societies in Europe and beyond. Many buildings are heated decentrally, which makes broad public acceptance essential. As governments may be held responsible for perceived policy impacts on individuals,...