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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Chi-Young Choi; Ilan Noy; Ashish Sedai |
| Abstract: | This study investigates how natural disasters and federal disaster declarations influence electoral outcomes in U.S. presidential elections from 1996 to 2020. Using county-level panel data and a two-way fixed effects framework, we analyze both incumbent vote share and voter turnout to describe the mechanisms linking disasters to political accountability. We find that severe disasters significantly reduce the incumbent party's vote share, consistent with the retrospective voting hypothesis. However, Presidential Disaster Declarations (PDDs) substantially mitigate these electoral losses, particularly in politically aligned urban areas, supporting the attentive retrospection hypothesis. Disasters tend to suppress voter turnout moderately, and PDDs only partially offset this effect, suggesting that disasters primarily harm incumbents by prompting voters to switch to the opposition rather than by discouraging their supporters from participating. Categorical analyses further reveal that partisan alignment, rather than PDD issuance alone, consistently drives electoral responses. Overall, our findings highlight how institutional coordination and federal aid shape democratic accountability in the wake of natural disasters. |
| Keywords: | disasters, elections, vote share, disaster declaration, U.S. county, voter turnout |
| JEL: | D72 N42 O18 P16 Q54 R10 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12298 |
| By: | Anthony Edo; Thomas Renault; Jérôme Valette |
| Abstract: | How does the electoral success of a far-right political force shape the strategies and policy platforms of mainstream candidates? We answer this question by exploiting the political shock of the creation of the Front National, an antiimmigration party, in 1972 and its sudden electoral breakthrough in the 1980s. Through a comprehensive textual analysis of candidate manifestos in French parliamentary elections from 1968 to 1997, we find that right-wing candidates respond to local far-right success, measured as voting shares, by amplifying the salience of immigration in their manifestos. They also adopt more negative positions on immigration and increasingly associate it with issues such as crime and the welfare state. In contrast, the ideological positions of left-wing candidates do not shift in response to far-right electoral gains. We finally show that the strategic adjustments of right-wing candidates help mitigate electoral losses to far-right competitors. |
| Keywords: | Political Economy;Anti-immigrant Parties;Electoral competition;Party Platform;Immigration |
| JEL: | F22 P16 D72 |
| Date: | 2025–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cii:cepidt:2025-20 |
| By: | Luca J. Uberti; Drini Imami; Mariapia Mendola |
| Abstract: | We examine the impact of an election campaign on the labor market outcomes of incumbent party supporters. Using unique data on voters' political preferences during a critical pre-election period in Albania, our difference-in-differences estimates show that supporting the ruling party prior to elections significantly improves individuals' employment and earnings. This labor market premium is particularly pronounced among individuals with low costs of campaign participation, whereas patronage jobs are concentrated in lower-tier public sector positions. Administrative data further show that job distribution to party supporters strongly correlates with increased vote shares for the incumbent. Our findings suggest that parties strategically allocate public employment to mobilize grassroots supporters and secure votes—a practice that fosters corruption and weakens democratic institutions. |
| Keywords: | Job patronage; political corruption; vote-buying; Albania; post-communist transition. |
| JEL: | D72 D73 H83 J45 M59 |
| Date: | 2025–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mib:wpaper:561 |
| By: | Fasani, Francesco (University of Milan); Ferro, Simone (University of Milan); Romarri, Alessio (University of Milan); Pasini, Elisabetta (Alma Economics) |
| Abstract: | This paper provides the first causal evaluation of the political impact of asylum seekers in the UK. Although dispersed across areas on a no-choice basis, political bargaining between central and local governments introduces potential endogeneity in their allocation. We address this with a novel IV strategy exploiting predetermined public-housing characteristics. For 2004–2019, we estimate a sizeable increase in the Conservative–Labour vote-share gap in local elections: a one within-area standard-deviation increase in dispersed asylum seekers widens the gap by 3.1 percentage points in favour of the Conservatives. We find similar rightward shifts in national elections, survey data on voting intentions, and the Brexit Leave vote. UKIP also gains, though less robustly. No effect appears for non-dispersed asylum seekers, who forgo subsidised housing and choose residences independently. Turning to mechanisms, voters move rightward without becoming more hostile towards foreigners. Using the universe of MPs’ speeches, we show that Conservative representatives from more exposed areas emphasise asylum and migration more, with no systematic change in tone or content. Heightened issue salience appears to drive voters’ choices. |
| Keywords: | Brexit, elections, refugees, MP’s speeches |
| JEL: | F22 D72 J15 |
| Date: | 2025–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18297 |
| By: | Nadav Kunievsky |
| Abstract: | In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass media; advances in AI-driven persuasion sharply reduce the cost and increase the precision of shaping public opinion, making the distribution of preferences itself an object of deliberate design. We develop a dynamic model in which elites choose how much to reshape the distribution of policy preferences, subject to persuasion costs and a majority rule constraint. With a single elite, any optimal intervention tends to push society toward more polarized opinion profiles - a ``polarization pull'' - and improvements in persuasion technology accelerate this drift. When two opposed elites alternate in power, the same technology also creates incentives to park society in ``semi-lock'' regions where opinions are more cohesive and harder for a rival to overturn, so advances in persuasion can either heighten or dampen polarization depending on the environment. Taken together, cheaper persuasion technologies recast polarization as a strategic instrument of governance rather than a purely emergent social byproduct, with important implications for democratic stability as AI capabilities advance. |
| Date: | 2025–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2512.04047 |
| By: | Wesley H. Holliday; Milan Moss\'e; Chase Norman; Eric Pacuit; Cynthia Wang |
| Abstract: | Algorithms for resolving majority cycles in preference aggregation have been studied extensively in computational social choice. Several sophisticated cycle-resolving methods, including Tideman's Ranked Pairs, Schulze's Beat Path, and Heitzig's River, are refinements of the Split Cycle (SC) method that resolves majority cycles by discarding the weakest majority victories in each cycle. Recently, Holliday and Pacuit proposed a new refinement of Split Cycle, dubbed Stable Voting, and a simplification thereof, called Simple Stable Voting (SSV). They conjectured that SSV is a refinement of SC whenever no two majority victories are of the same size. In this paper, we prove the conjecture up to 6 alternatives and refute it for more than 6 alternatives. While our proof of the conjecture for up to 5 alternatives uses traditional mathematical reasoning, our 6-alternative proof and 7-alternative counterexample were obtained with the use of SAT solving. The SAT encoding underlying this proof and counterexample is applicable far beyond SC and SSV: it can be used to test properties of any voting method whose choice of winners depends only on the ordering of margins of victory by size. |
| Date: | 2025–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2512.00616 |