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...

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...

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...

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 study the impact of an election campaign on the labor market outcomes of incumbent party supporters. Using unique data on voters' political preferences during a pre-election period in Albania and a DiD design that compares the evolution of outcomes among close neighbours, we show that...

Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) proposed that organizations persist when loyalty tempers incentives to exit after adverse shocks. We test this argument using newly digitized individual-level voting records from 28 English constituencies (1832-1868), covering 134,000 real votes....

To what extent did class shape political behavior during early democratization and industrialization, and did class voting reflect economic interests or durable political identities? We use newly collected individual-level panel data from open-ballot elections in the nineteenth-century...

We study the communication strategies on Twitter/X of 367 political leaders in 21 countries, focusing on electoral competition between populists and non-populists. We measure polarization by the ease with which the leader can be classified as populist or not, conditional on his tweet. We find...

Declining civic engagement increasingly strains welfare state institutions. This paper asks whether civic values can be shaped through early educational investments. I study Tax and School, a large-scale program implemented in Italian primary and secondary schools to promote fiscal and civic...

We study whether the partisan affiliation of U.S. state governors affects the outcome of partisan judicial elections. Exploiting close gubernatorial races from 1946 to 2023, we find that electing a Democratic (Republican) governor significantly increases the subsequent vote share of Democratic...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for assessing individual democratic commitment and demonstrates its usefulness in the German context. Building on and bridging existing strands of research (e.g. on support for democracy, conceptualizations of democracy, evaluations of democracy), the...

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 models theoretically and tests empirically the hypothesis that the decision about the location of a public bad within a multi-tiered structure of government (a facility providing benefits throughout the federation but inflicting damage to the region hosting it) can be driven by...

The parliamentary elections held in Bangladesh on 12 February 2026 marked a turn­ing point in the country’s recent history. In August 2024, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who had served for a total of 20 years, with one interruption, was removed from office. An interim government led by Nobel...

This paper contributes to the debate on identity politics by examining whether the religious composition of voters predicts electoral outcomes. Focusing on West Bengal, India, we use assembly constituency-level data from six elections between 2011 and 2024 to examine how the Muslim population...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

"Die vom Bündnis "Zusammen gegen Rechts" zu Beginn des Jahres 2024 organisierten Demonstrationen wurden vielfach als Ausdruck einer breiten gesellschaftlichen Mobilisierung gegen Rechtsextremismus verstanden. Eine bislang jedoch kaum untersuchte Frage ist, in welchem Zusammenhang diese Proteste...

We study how public disclosure of politicians' outside income affects their behavior. We exploit a disclosure reform targeting German federal MPs and tax-return data in a differencein-differences setup using unaffected state MPs as controls. MPs increase their outside income by 24%, driven by...

Radical Right (RR) political parties have become increasingly radicalized on immigration across many developed countries. We study whether exposure to slanted (i.e., one-sided) news shifts policy views of RR voters on immigration in Austria. In an online experiment, participants received slanted...

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...

Populist radical right parties known for populist, anti-immigrant, and Eurosceptic stances have gained varying electoral support in the European Union. Slovakia is no exception and this study investigates the determinants of support for populist radical right parties in Slovakia, focusing on...

First-generation immigrants face a seniority ceiling that limits their political incorporation as candidates and officeholders. Career ladders that require qualification time in lower positions create structural barriers for this group. We use linked data from Swedish electoral ballots and...

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...