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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Victor Hernandez Martinez; Pawel Krolikowski |
| Abstract: | We study how mass-layoff announcements affect electoral outcomes using a newly assembled dataset of US establishment-level administrative notices from the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. A matched event study compares same-state counties with and without sizable WARN-announced layoffs. Controlling for local labor-market conditions, layoff announcements increase the Democratic-Republican vote margin by reducing Republican votes and increasing Democratic votes without clearly altering election winners or incumbent support. Effects appear across political offices, are not driven by manufacturing decline, and are geographically localized. The responses operate through turnout composition rather than vote switching and result in no policy-induced changes in transfer payments. |
| JEL: | D72 J63 J65 R23 |
| Date: | 2026–08–31 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedcwq:103764 |
| By: | Toshiya Yoshimura |
| Abstract: | We study coalitional manipulation of interval-valued median correspondences on the single-peaked domain. Under the pessimistic extension, group strategy-proofness rules out any genuinely set-valued choice. Under the optimistic and best--worst extensions, by contrast, group strategy-proofness characterizes target set correspondences. Moreover, coalitions of at most two voters suffice for both the impossibility and characterization results. Thus, coalitional robustness sharply restricts, but need not eliminate, set-valued flexibility. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.18739 |
| By: | Kerler, Philipp; Petrović, Valentina |
| Abstract: | Economic grievances are central in explaining the rise of right-wing illiberalism. Grievances allow challenger parties to rally around scapegoating outsider groups, such as ethnic minorities, immigrants, or foreigners. Some research argues that continuing decline allows illiberal parties to consolidate power by entrenching and polarizing around such cleavages. However, when illiberal parties are in power and economic decline continues, we argue that, absent cultural cleavages, retrospective economic voting prevails. Zooming in on the case of Trstenik, a Serbian town with a significant industrial legacy, strongly affected by deindustrialization, we leverage data from a novel survey and semi-structured interviews in a mixed-methods approach. We document clear patterns of existing grievances and blame on the government. However, positive, hopeful interpretations also exist among affected individuals. We show that support for the illiberal right-wing incumbent Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) is positively associated with positive interpretations and negatively associated with grievances. Our study contributes an important qualifying account to current debates about the economic roots of right-wing illiberalism by highlighting the importance of scope conditions. |
| Date: | 2026–08–29 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:6rkx7_v2 |
| By: | Gurung, Nirmal |
| Abstract: | Elections are one of the mainstays of democracy, but they also carry a heavy financial burden. Nepal has emerged as a federal democratic republic with a regular cycle of elections at local, provincial and federal levels every five years. This case study examines patterns of expenditure in Nepal’s elections, particularly pre-election expenditure by government, political parties and candidates at the local level. The analysis, based on government reports, Election Commission data and academic studies, shows that elections in Nepal have become increasingly costly affairs. The overall expenditure in the 2017 election cycle has been calculated at Rs 131.63 billion in all three tiers while the local elections alone have seen Rs 69.42 billion outlay. The government had allocated Rs 8.11 billion to the Election Commission for the 2022 local elections, but candidates routinely spent far above the official expenditure limits with mayorship candidates spending an average of Rs 1.74 million against the Rs 750, 000 cap. The study reveals three trends of inflation of pre-election expenditures, strategic distribution of development funds to buy voters, increase in campaign costs due to inflation and competitive electoral environment, and significant underreporting of candidate expenditures. The problem is weak enforcement of spending limits, the lack of transparency in political financing and the high cost of winning an election. The paper concludes that in the absence of meaningful campaign finance reform, stronger enforcement mechanisms and greater transparency, election costs in Nepal will continue to rise, siphoning public resources from development priorities and undermining the integrity of the democratic process. |
| Date: | 2026–09–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:lawarc:c38b7_v1 |
| By: | Paolo Verme |
| Abstract: | What happens to a party's vote share when it nominates a woman for executive office? The evidence on female candidates is dominated by legislative races and by designs that pool parties and periods into a single average effect, which is typically null. This paper builds a new county-level panel of US gubernatorial elections - 578 races in 49 states from 1980 to 2024, reconstructed and audited from primary sources - and estimates party-specific, time-varying nomination effects with a stacked difference-in-differences design around within-state transitions from male to female nominees. The average null conceals a sharp asymmetry. Republican transitions to a female nominee since 2016 are followed by a county-level vote-share decline of 6.5 percentage points, robust across cohort, weighting and inference checks. No comparable average differential is detected for Democratic nominees. Survey-ballot diagnostics are compatible with demand-side discrimination but cannot identify that channel. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.23051 |