The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) paved the road to Black empowerment. How did southern whites respond? Leveraging newly digitized data on county-level voter registration rates by race between 1956 and 1980, and exploiting pre-determined variation in exposure to the federal intervention, we...

This paper investigates how direct election regimes (à la presidential democracy) affect the selection of women into political offices compared to indirect appointment (à la parliamentary). Exploiting the staggered phase-in across Italian municipalities of a reform to the local institutional...

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...

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...

Gethin, Martínez-Toledano and Piketty (2022) analyze the long-run evolution of political cleavages using a new database on socioeconomic determinants of voting from approximately 300 elections in 21 Western democracies between 1948 and 2020. They find that, in the 1950s and 1960s, voting for...