In mid-February, the world’s largest elections took place in Indonesia over the course of a single day. Around 205 million eligible voters were called to the polls to elect a new president, vice president and almost 20,000 representatives for the national, pro­vincial and district...

Left-wing and right-wing populist voters differ the most on the issues of immigration, the importance of traditions, religiosity, and the need to dismantle the welfare state. Populist voters from left and right share concerns about economic insecurity, a lack of empathy by politicians, and a...

We develop a model to analyze policymakers’ incentives to install policy rules, comparing the case of no rule with a binding and a contingent policy rule that allows policymakers to suspend the rule in response to a sufficiently large shock. First, abstracting from political polarization, we...

We investigate whether US House representatives favour special interest groups over constituents in periods of low media attention to politics. Analysing 666 roll calls from 2005 to 2018, we show that representatives are more likely to vote against their constituency's preferred position the...

People's trust in state and political institutions is a key foundation of a well-functioning economy. We estimate the impact of direct elections on people's trust in state and political institutions, using a major political reform in Indonesia as the source of exogenous variation. Prior to 2005,...

We investigate the effect of elections on underreporting COVID-19 mortality, measured as the difference between excess mortality and official statistics. Our identification strategy takes advantage of a natural experiment of the unanticipated onset of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and the...

We track the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on political preferences through "high" and "low" phases of the pandemic. We ask about the effects of the health and the economic costs of the pandemic measured at both personal and municipality levels. Consistent with the literature, we estimate...