This paper examines the short- to long-term effects of large-scale refugee inflows on labour markets and anti-asylum attitudes. Using the exogenous arrival of Yugoslav refugees to Switzerland in the 1990s and municipal-level data with an instrumental variables strategy, we find that refugee...

We study a large-scale intervention designed by civil society organizations to reduce vote buying in Uganda’s 2016 elections. We study this intervention in light of a model where incumbents benefit from a first-mover and valence advantage, vote buying and campaigning are complementary, and...

Do economic sanctions affect internal support of sanctioned countries’ governments? To answer this question, we focus on the sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014 and identify their effect on voting behavior in both presidential and parliamentary elections. On the economic side, the sanctions...

Far-right parties are gaining support across Europe. Their level of participation in national governments is increasing, and they are expected to make further gains in the European Parliament elections in June 2024. As their influence over European Union (EU) policy rises, it is imperative to...

Biased beliefs affect real-world decisions, including political solutions to societal challenges. One crucial example is environmental policy: people tend to underestimate the incentive effect of Pigouvian policies. Addressing biased beliefs at scale is then paramount. In the days leading up to...

We provide causal evidence that immigration has contributed to the polarization of American politics. Using an ancestry-based shift-share instrument, we study immigration flows into U.S. counties between 1992 and 2016. Counties exposed to larger immigrant inflows become more polarized both in...

I study how political parties affect representation in the U.S. House. To do so, I account for party pressure on the votes of members in an otherwise standard spatial model that uses roll call voting patterns to identify member ideologies. I simultaneously estimate voter ideologies from survey...

Social media platforms are often credited with empowering grassroots movements in the pursuit of political freedoms. In this paper, we show how social media can also be exploited by political elites to undermine democratic institutions, using the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection as a case...

Democratic societies depend on citizens following rules even when those rules are set by political opponents. Rising polarization may threaten this behavior. We test the impact of polarization on rule compliance in the United States across three pre-registered waves (May and November 2024; April 2025; n...

A growing literature concerns the role of symbolic politics, including how political parties benefit electorally from politicizing the past, a strategy which should be more effective in localities with physical memories of the past. We test this argument by studying the effect of the local...

In an important and much cited study, Pettersson-Lidbom (2008) identifies significant left-wing majority coalition effects on economic outcomes for Swedish local governments, 1974-1994. We first replicate the original study and then extend the original research by applying Pettersson-Lidbom's...

Why are inefficient policies popular? One explanation is incomplete voter information. Evidence from survey experiments in Argentina points instead to inattention. The experiments explore voter evaluations of two anti-inflation policies, price controls and limits on monetary emission....

In an important and much cited study, Pettersson-Lidbom (2008) identifies significant left-wing majority coalition effects on economic outcomes for Swedish local governments, 1974-1994. We first replicate the original study and then extend the original research by applying Pettersson-Lidbom's...

We study political shocks as potential birth outcomes stressors, specifically the unexpected result of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We investigate this two-sided shock using an innovative data linkage: Colorado voter registrations and birth certificates, matched by sex, birth year, and...

This paper reviews a growing body of theoretical and empirical research on Italian populism through a detailed examination of the Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, M5S), focusing on its experience in municipal elections. Using a wide range of administrative and survey data, as well as...

Air pollution is a major externality whose consequences extend beyond health and productivity. This paper shows that short-run pollution shocks also reduce democratic participation. We combine official, municipality-level election results from 32 national, European, regional, and municipal...

Environmental challenges increasingly shape political discourses across Europe, yet their influence on actual environmental governance remains unclear. This paper examines the political economy mechanisms linking environmental change, party platforms, and the decentralisation of environmental...

Natural hazards are an increasing concern, placing disaster preparedness and mitigation at the forefront of policy agendas. In this context, Italy’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) has allocated €3 billion for explicit disaster prevention, with a primary focus on hydrogeological risks...

The problem of finding the factors influencing voting behavior is of crucial interest in political science and is frequently analyzed in books and articles. But there are not so many studies whose supporting information comes from official registers. This work uses official vote records in Spain...

Terrorist attacks have often been found to impact voting behaviours in the country of the attack. Here I study the impact of 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York on voting preferences in the UK, concluding that 9/11 impacted the voting intentions of the British, significantly increasing...

The 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis is a watershed phenomenon that reshaped global capitalism. Stemming from the argument that the Crisis was caused by deregulation, this article assesses to what extent the financial industry influenced the legislative process underlying these reforms. The...

This paper examines the short- to long-term effects of large-scale refugee inflows on labour markets and anti-asylum attitudes. Using the exogenous arrival of Yugoslav refugees to Switzerland in the 1990s and municipal-level data with an instrumental variables strategy, we find that refugee...

Populism research has found much scholarly and public attention alike in recent years. Most research has focused on how populism can be defined, assessed or even measured. Even though there are emerging studies on populist messages, few of them have paid attention on causally identifying ways in...

This paper investigates the causal effect of the term length of political executives on economic policy outcomes. To establish causality, we exploit the staggered adoption of four-year terms for governors across US states, using data for the period 1937-2008. We find that increasing governors'...

This study contests the emerging consensus that the educational realignment in voting behavior is centered on non-economic policies. Leveraging comprehensive post-election surveys and party manifesto data, I examine voter responses to previously underexplored dimensions of economic policy - most...

Despite a comparatively strong economic outlook in 2024, American voters chose Donald Trump. Does this mean voters no longer care about the economy? This article argues that they do - but not always in the way predicted by conventional theory. By contrasting "Bidenomics" in the United States...