We present the first comprehensive evidence on the role of cognitive ability and personality traits in the selection of electoral candidates and election of politicians. Using unique data that combine population registers and election statistics from local government elections in Finland with...

Despite the growing public debate on fiscal surprise during election periods in jurisdictions where the democratic dispensation is young, comprehensive empirical works to this effect in the case of Africa are hard to find. This study, therefore, sought to contribute to the debate on two counts....

Vaccines are responsible for large increases in human welfare and yet we know little about the political impacts of publicly-managed vaccination campaigns. We fill this gap by studying the case of Chile, which offers a rare combination of a high-stakes election, voluntary voting, and a...

Using newly digitized data on the growth of the telegraph network in America during 1840-1852, the paper studies the impacts of the electric telegraph on national elections. I use proximity to daily newspapers with telegraphic connections to Washington to generate plausibly exogenous variation...

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...

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...