Populist parties enjoy stable support in various European countries. The literature on the rise of populism argues that this support especially increases in times of crises. Surprisingly, the German right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) did not increase its support in the wake...

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. This influential literature marks a promising development but has drawn criticism. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots....

The effect of ranking and the effect of attention both increase the chances that candidates running in the top positions of electoral lists will win voters’ support. We exploit a variation in ballot layout (the location of the break between the first and second sides of the ballot) in the...

Using a novel regional database covering over 200 elections in several European countries, this paper provides new empirical evidence on the political consequences of fiscal consolidations. To identify exogenous reductions in regional public spending, we use a Bartik-type instrument that...

Few concepts have captured the imagination of the conflict and development communities in recent years as powerfully as the idea of a 'political settlement'. At its most ambitious, 'political settlements analysis' (PSA) promises to explain why conflicts occur and states collapse, the conditions...

We investigate the effect of the refugee inflow between 2014 and 2017 on voting for the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the national parliamentary election in 2017 in Germany. Drawing on unique small-scale data enables us to distinguish between the contact theory, captured by...

We investigate the effect of the refugee inflow between 2014 and 2017 on voting for the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the national parliamentary election in 2017 in Germany. Drawing on unique small-scale data enables us to distinguish between the contact theory, captured by...

Exploiting the random allocation of asylum seekers to different locations in Germany, we study the impact of right-wing voting on refugees' integration. We find that in municipalities with more voting for the right-wing AfD, refugees have worse economic and social integration. These impacts are...

Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of representative democracy. In recent years, however, elections in many advanced democracies have increasingly come under attack by populist actors and rhetoric questioning the integrity of the electoral process. While scholarly attention has so far...