Who drives social change - the people or activist elites? While progressive reforms are often championed by elites, their preferences may diverge from those of the broader group they aim to represent, producing unintended political consequences. We study this dynamic in the context of female...

Revolving door laws restrict public officials from representing private interests before government after leaving office. While these laws mitigate potential conflicts of interest, they also may affect the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the financial benefits of holding...

We investigate whether term limits can help historically underrepresented groups, such as women, gain faster access to positions of political power. We exploit evidence from Italian local elections where, in a context of rapidly increasing women's presence in politics, mayoral term limits were...

A substantial literature studies franchise extension, focusing primarily on class-based - rather than race-based - voting restrictions. This paper constructs and analyzes a novel dataset that codes the presence of race-based restrictions on voting in 131 jurisdictions over 1730-2000 (consisting...

The fragmentation of the party system has confronted the German mixed-member proportional electoral system with a trilemma. It can only ensure two out of three goals: proportionality, guaranteed representation of district winners, and a fixed and predictable size of the Bundestag. This paper...

We empirically identify politically-motivated redistricting and its consequences, studying the effects of changed electorate composition on US congressional district boundaries and on political outcomes. We exploit the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized millions of...

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) paved the road to Black empowerment. How did southern whites respond? Leveraging newly digitized data on county-level voter registration rates by race between 1956 and 1980, and exploiting pre-determined variation in exposure to the federal intervention, we...

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) paved the road to Black empowerment. How did southern whites respond? Leveraging newly digitized data on county-level voter registration rates by race between 1956 and 1980, and exploiting pre-determined variation in exposure to the federal intervention, we...

Inwiefern sind das formale Wahlrecht und somit die Möglichkeit der politischen Mitbestimmung in Österreich von der individuellen Position auf dem Arbeitsmarkt abhängig? Um diese Frage zu beantworten, wird eine deskriptive Analyse nichtösterreichischer Staatsbürger:innen entlang...

Revolving door laws restrict public officials from representing private interests before government after leaving office. While these laws mitigate potential conflicts of interest, they also may affect the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the financial benefits of holding...

We study the health consequences of redistributing political power through the 1975 extension of the Voting Rights Act, which eliminated barriers to voting for previously disenfranchised nonwhite populations. The intervention led to broad declines in under-five mortality but sharply contrasting...

We estimate the impact of a political party's ability to unilaterally redistrict Congressional seats upon partisan seat share allocations in the U.S. House of Representatives. Controlling for stateXdecade and year effects, we find an 8.2 percentage point increase in the Republican House seat...

We discuss how the concept of partisan gerrymandering has been addressed by academics and by federal and state courts, with particular emphasis on the abdication by the US Supreme Court of any responsibility to reject as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, no matter how egregious, and the...

Der Beitrag beschreibt, wie Wahlrechtsnovellierungen als Teil einer gelebten Demokratie durch stets neu gewonnene Erfahrungswerte einem regelmäßigen Wandel unterliegen. Im Fokus stehen hierbei aus Erfahrungen der Bundestagswahl 2021 gewonnene Anpassungsvorschläge, die das aktuell geltende...

Aging societies face a fundamental challenge: How to represent future oriented policies in the politics of today? Voting age reforms and, more generally, policies that encourage the participation of the youth in politics are discussed as one solution. In this report, we study whether voting age...

This paper investigates the patterns of Minority representation and voter registration in U.S. municipal governments. For the period 1981-2020, we report substantial levels of strategic underrepresentation of African American, Asian, and Latino voters in U.S. local politics. Disproportionality...

This paper investigates the effects of campaign finance rules on electoral outcomes. In French departmental and municipal elections, candidates competing in districts above 9,000 inhabitants face spending limits and are eligible for public reimbursement if they obtain more than five percent of...

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 removed barriers to voting for Black Americans in the South; existing work documents that this in turn led to shifts in the distribution of public funding towards areas with a higher share of Black residents and also reduced Black-White earnings disparities....