The article traces the effect of climate policies on the electoral support for governing parties in Sweden. The study uses mixed methods, combining temporal regression discontinuities with a qualitative content text analysis of newspapers. The coded newspaper articles indicate an informed public...

We exploit new experimental and quasi-experimental data to investigate voters’ intrinsic motivation to engage politically. Does the right to vote increase engagement or, given incentives to free ride, do eligible voters remain rationally unengaged? Does knowledge that one’s group is pivotal...

This study examines strategic communication before voting under various voting rules. A set of imperfectly informed voters communicate before casting their votes in binary elections. Voters have partially conflicting interests: there is a correct alternative in some states, while in others,...

A considerable body of literature has shown that heat affects individual behavior and decision-making. Surprisingly, almost nothing is known about the impact of heat on voting decisions. Using municipal-level voting data for the 2016 Peace Plebiscite in Colombia ratifying the peace agreement...

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...

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...

This research project investigates whether one of the purported benefits of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) – an expanded candidate pool – has been realized in the cities where it has been implemented. Employing a difference-in-differences approach with matching, I find that any increase in the...

Liquid Democracy is a voting system touted as the golden medium between representative and direct democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters can delegate their votes as they wish. The outcome can be superior to simple majority voting, but even when experts are correctly identified,...

Guinnane and Hoffman (subsequently GH) comment on two of our papers: Voigtländer and Voth: “Persecution Perpetuated” (2012, subsequently PP) and Satyanath, Voigtländer and Voth: Bowling for Fascism (2017, subsequently BF). They allege that our econometric results are fragile and depend on...

During World War II, Nazi Germany established an extensive network of concentration camps across the whole Europe, functioning as the center of genocide, political persecution and forced labor. In this paper I investigate the political legacies of concentration camps at the local level and find...