|
on Positive Political Economics |
| By: | Baraldi, Anna Laura; Cantabene, Claudia; De Iudicibus, Alessandro; Fosco, Giovanni; Papagni, Erasmo |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how natural disasters shape electoral preferences by analyzing the impact of earthquakes in Italy between 1990 and 2019. Using a staggered Difference-in-Differences design, we estimate that affected municipalities are more likely to elect female, more educated, and older city councilors. Similar shifts occur for mayors. These effects persist across election cycles and are robust to alternative specifications. We rule out competing explanations such as changes in turnout or candidate supply. The findings suggest that crises push voters to favor politicians perceived as more competent, experienced, and prosocial. |
| Keywords: | Natural disasters; Electoral behavior; Local elections; Political selection; Gender and representation; Earthquakes; Difference-in-Differences; Voter preferences |
| JEL: | H70 H84 Q54 |
| Date: | 2025–06–19 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:125061 |
| By: | Aleksandra Conevska; Can Mutlu |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we address a longstanding puzzle over the functional form that better approximates voter utility from political choices. Though it has become the norm in the literature to represent voter utility with concave loss functions, for decades scholars have underscored this assumption’s potential shortcomings. Yet there exists little to no evidence to support one functional form assumption over another. We fill this gap by first identifying electoral settings where the different functional forms generate divergent predictions about voter behavior. We then assess which functional form better matches observed voter and abstention behavior using Cast Vote Record (CVR) data that captures the anonymized ballots of millions of voters in the 2020 U.S. general election. Our findings indicate that concave loss functions fail to predict voting and abstention behavior, and it is the reverse S-shaped loss functions, such as the Gaussian function, that better match observed voter behavior. |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:not:notnic:2025-02 |
| By: | Francesco Ferlenga; Stephanie Kang |
| Abstract: | We study how expanding immigrants’ rights affects their political and social integration by exploiting Romania’s accession to the EU in 2007, which granted municipal voting and residency rights to Romanian immigrants in Italy. Using an event-study analysis at the municipality level, we find three key results. First, enfranchisement increased Romanians’ turnout and the likelihood of electing Romanian-born councilors in municipal elections, particularly in competitive races. An instrumented difference-in-differences strategy shows that this effect is driven by the enfranchisement of preexisting immigrants, not by new arrivals. Second, the rate of consent to organ donation among Romanian immigrants increased after 2007, indicating that the expansion of rights extends beyond political representation to prosocial behavior. However, we also find that the presence of immigrants still increases the probability of right-leaning party victories and municipal spending on public security, while reducing spending on social programs. This suggests that native backlash to immigrant presence outweighs the political influence of newly enfranchised immigrant communities in shaping local electoral outcomes. |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:not:notnic:2025-04 |
| By: | Gabriele Gratton; Barton E. Lee |
| Abstract: | We study a model of popular demand for anti-elite populist reforms that drain the swamp: replace experienced public servants with novices that will only acquire experience with time. Voters benefit from experienced public servants because they are more effective at delivering public goods and more competent at detecting emergency threats. However, public servants’ policy preferences do not always align with those of voters. This tradeoff produces two key forces in our model: public servants’ incompetence spurs disagreement between them and voters, and their effectiveness grants them more power to dictate policy. Both of these effects fuel mistrust between voters and public servants, sometimes inducing voters to drain the swamp in cycles of anti-elite populism. We study which factors can sustain a responsive democracy or induce a technocracy. When instead populism arises, we discuss which reforms may reduce the frequency of populist cycles, including recruiting of public servants and isolating them from politics. Our results support the view that a more inclusive and representative bureaucracy protects against anti-elite populism. We provide empirical evidence that lack of trust in public servants is a key force behind support for anti-elite populist parties and argue that our model helps explain the rise of anti-elite populism in large robust democracies. |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:baf:cbafwp:cbafwp25244 |
| By: | Blumenthal, Benjamin; Nunnari, Salvatore |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we introduce reciprocity concerns in a political agency model with symmetric learning about politicians’ ability and moral hazard. Voters with reciprocity concerns are both prospective—that is, seek to select competent politicians—and retrospective—that is, reward fair actions and punish unfair ones. We focus on how electoral incentives induce politicians to exert effort (electoral control) and how voters remove incompetent politicians (electoral screening). We show that taking voters’ reciprocity concerns into account has important normative implications and can overturn results from standard models that neglect them: increasing transparency about the incumbent’s effort improves electoral control if and only if voters have sufficiently strong reciprocity concerns; increasing benefits from office improves electoral control if and only if voters have sufficiently low reciprocity concerns. Moreover, we show that reciprocity concerns can affect electoral screening, by affecting the competence threshold incumbents must clear to ensure reelection, generating incumbency advantages or disadvantages. |
| Date: | 2025–06–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:9mv2e_v1 |
| By: | Gianluigi Conzo; Pierluigi Conzo |
| Abstract: | This paper explores the unintended effects of a sudden media shift from pandemic health-crisis coverage to the Russo-Ukrainian war. Using a dynamic Difference-in-Differences, we first examine how increased media focus on the war impacted contagion across Italian municipalities, with proximity to U.S. military bases serving as our treatment and proxy for heightened fear. Our findings reveal a temporary spike in infections, particularly in areas closer to bases, driven by increased mobility and a rise in "bunker" Google searches. Secondly, we show that politicians, especially from right-wing parties, gained electoral advantages in subsequent unexpected elections by leveraging war-related fears at the onset of the conflict. Voters in districts near bases responded more to the emotional tone of war-related messaging than its volume, underscoring fear’s influence on political outcomes. In contrast, left-wing parties benefited from the war’s media prominence, as their supporters responded more to issue salience than to emotional tone. |
| Keywords: | Media attention, Issue salience, Health outcomes, Electoral outcomes, Political communication, COVID-19, Russo-Ukrainian War, Fear of war. |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cca:wpaper:743 |
| By: | Hunt Allcott; Matthew Gentzkow; Ro’ee Levy; Adriana Crespo-Tenorio; Natasha Dumas; Winter Mason; Devra Moehler; Pablo Barbera; Taylor W. Brown; Juan Carlos Cisneros; Drew Dimmery; Deen Freelon; Sandra González-Bailón; Andrew M. Guess; Young Mie Kim; David Lazer; Neil Malhotra; Sameer Nair-Desai; Brendan Nyhan; Ana Carolina Paixao de Queiroz; Jennifer Pan; Jaime Settle; Emily Thorson; Rebekah Tromble; Carlos Velasco Rivera; Benjamin Wittenbrink; Magdalena Wojcieszak; Shiqi Yang; Saam Zahedian; Annie Franco; Chad Kiewiet de Jonge; Natalie Jomini Stroud; Joshua A. Tucker |
| Abstract: | We study the effects of social media political advertising by randomizing subsets of 36, 906 Facebook users and 25, 925 Instagram users to have political ads removed from their news feeds for six weeks before the 2020 US presidential election. We show that most presidential ads were targeted toward parties’ own supporters and that fundraising ads were most common. On both Facebook and Instagram, we found no detectable effects of removing political ads on political knowledge, polarization, perceived legitimacy of the election, political participation (including campaign contributions), candidate favorability, and turnout. This was true overall and for both Democrats and Republicans separately. |
| JEL: | D90 L82 O33 |
| Date: | 2025–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33818 |
| By: | Belmonte, Alessandro; Ticchi, Davide; Ubaldi, Michele |
| Abstract: | This paper studies whether affirmative action policies towards the outsider group may foster a backlash by the insider one. We exploit the unique historical context provided by the legacy of apartheid in democratic South Africa. We found that the completion of the affirmative action legislation increases the support for far-right parties in national elections by 0.2% to 0.3% on average. We documented that this effect is stronger in areas located closer to the territories of the former homelands. We also found that affirmative action changed the voting intentions of the individuals. This effect is primarily driven by increased self-perceived economic insecurity. Finally, we did not find evidence of an effect of the legislation on increased interethnic violence. |
| Keywords: | Affirmative action, ethnic inequality, labor markets, South Africa, voting behavior |
| JEL: | D72 J15 J78 K31 N37 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1626 |
| By: | Massimo Bordignon; Davide Cipullo; Gilberto Turati |
| Abstract: | We study the reaction of low vs. high-skilled politicians to a reform, approved in Italy in 2011, that introduces stringent individual financial and career sanctions to local administrators who are judged responsible for their municipality’s bankruptcy. To this aim, we leverage exogenous variation induced by close elections between a mayoral candidate who holds a college degree and a mayoral candidate who does not. After the introduction of sanctions, skilled politicians tend to declare bankruptcy with a higher probability than low-skilled politicians. The effect is concentrated in municipalities in which the financial state of distress was not advocating for a bankruptcy. Our findings document that individual sanctions against politicians may backfire if strategic considerations are not taken into account properly. |
| Keywords: | soft budget constraint, bankruptcy, municipalities, intergovernmental relations, mayors, political selection |
| JEL: | H63 H72 H74 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11930 |
| By: | Freitag, Karolin; Kiemes, Laura; Wuttke, Alexander |
| Abstract: | This report documents our replication of Braley et al.'s (2023) study, which examined whether voters become less willing to subvert democratic norms upon learning that their political opponents are more committed to democracy than previously assumed. The original study found that correcting voters' misperceptions about their opponents' democratic commitments effectively reduced their own willingness to undermine democratic norms. We replicate this finding within the German multiparty context, performing a direct replication with minimal modifications to the original design. Necessary adaptations address the multiparty structure in Germany, where identifying an out-party is less straightforward than in a two-party system. Additionally, we refined some survey items to enhance clarity. Consistent with the original findings, our replication study shows that correcting voters' misperceptions about the democratic commitment of out-partisans reduces their own willingness to subvert democratic norms, from 0.25 in the control group to 0.19 in the treatment group (on a 0-1 scale). In standardized terms, the observed treatment effect size (Cohen's d = 0.4) closely matches the original effect, exceeding it by 8%. |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:235 |
| By: | Marwil J. Davila-Fernandez; Christian R. Proano; Serena Sordi |
| Abstract: | Drawing on the political science literature, we develop a heterogeneous agents macro model that differentiates between left- and right-wing voting preferences in two political dimensions: the economic-distributive (ED) and the socio-cultural (SC) in particular regarding climate change. The model is compatible with the emergence of "ED-left/SC-left", "ED-left/SC-right", "ED-right/SC-left", and "ED-right/SC-right" coalitions, each associated with a tax rate on the skill wage premium and on carbon emissions. Human capital accumulation regarding results in a wage differential that influences production and feedback on inequality. Through induced technical change, taxing emissions impacts the development of carbon-neutral production techniques, affecting output and ultimately feeding political attitudes. We study analytically and through numerical simulations the conditions resulting in the coexistence of multiple stable equilibria and the possible implications for carbon emissions. Three results are worth highlighting. First, when income inequality, captured by the skill premium, is the primary motivation to become more educated, left-wing ED coalitions generate higher inequality than their right-wing counterpart. Second, it is shown that the consensus required to implement a carbon tax is only the first part of the problem. Absolute decoupling requires a sufficiently strong response from technology favouring carbon-neutral production techniques. Finally, our model suggests that the SC dimension matters most under medium levels of inequality. When inequality is very high, as in the pre-war period, ED dominates the debate, and there is a right-wing SC consensus. As inequality fell during the 1950s and 1960s, socio-cultural aspects gained importance. This change led to a situation where "ED-left/SC-left", "ED-left/SC-right", "ED-right/SC-left", and "ED-right/SC-right" stable coalitions became possible, creating a disconnect between education and left-wing support. |
| Keywords: | political cleavages, climate change, inequality, human capital, carbon tax |
| JEL: | C62 D72 Q01 Q54 |
| Date: | 2025–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:een:camaaa:2025-37 |
| By: | Benjamin Lockwood; Francesco Porcelli; James Rockey |
| Abstract: | This paper uses an instrumental variable approach based on close elections to evaluate the effects of political parties on local fiscal policy in England from 1998 to 2015. Our main finding is that when we condition on the central government grant, political control of the council by Labour or Conservative parties has no effect on total service expenditure, the composition of that expenditure, and the property tax rate (council tax per band D property). We find the same null results for capital expenditure, debt, and authorized debt limits. Using data on the distribution of income within local authorities, we find no evidence that this null result is being driven by homogeneous electorates rather than fiscal constraints. Thus, our results confirm the widely expressed belief that centrally imposed constraints on local government fiscal policy (rate-capping, and more recently, compulsory referenda, and the Prudential Code for borrowing) hold local government fiscal policy in a tight grip. |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:not:notnic:2025-06 |
| By: | Marco Alfano (Lancaster University and RF Berlin); Margaux Clarr (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)); Jaime Marques-Pereira (Lancaster University, Economics Department, UK); Jean-François Maystadt (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)) |
| Abstract: | US drone strikes are popular with the electorate and overseen by the President. This paper investigates whether the US President uses drone strikes strategically for political gain. We document that US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen are significantly more likely before US elections, when popularity has high payoffs. We find no changes for unpopular, piloted airstrikes. Consistent with unusually high drone approvals, abnormally cloudy skies before US elections lead to a postponement or redirection of strikes to other target countries. To examine whether drone strikes are used strategically to divert attention from damaging media coverage, we gather closed captions from all cable TV coverage of the President and analyze their tone using natural language processing. Drone strikes are more likely in weeks when news anchors cover the President more negatively, a relation that holds both during and outside of election periods. We find no such relationship for piloted airstrikes or during weeks of high news pressure. |
| Keywords: | drone strikes, strategic timing, conflict, political economy |
| JEL: | D72 D74 H56 L82 |
| Date: | 2025–07–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctl:louvir:2025010 |
| By: | Sam Jones; Felix Schilling; Finn Tarp |
| Abstract: | We link a new database of politically exposed persons with the complete register of firms established in Mozambique since Independence. Focusing on the network of connections between firm owners, we use a generalized event study analysis to show that holders of political office achieve significant gains in the number of companies owned and their structural power (centrality) within the business-owner network. These gains are concentrated in joint-stock firms active in provision of business services, and our results persist when we aggregate the data to the family-level. |
| Keywords: | Firm ownership, Benefits, Political connections, Rent-seeking, Mozambique |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2025-47 |
| By: | Morgan, Marc; Souza, Pedro |
| Abstract: | This paper proposes a novel assessment of the Kuznets curve for an underdeveloped country engaging in rapid late development. We mobilize new long-run data for Brazil, combining surveys, administrative records, and national accounts statistics, to compute macro-consistent income shares and other distributional indicators since the 1920s. Our estimates show a more nuanced picture for the traditional Kuznets hypothesis than what the existing literature has suggested. The major complication for the standard narrative lies in the period roughly between 1950 and 1964, for which existing estimates are either too infrequent, not disaggregated enough, or incomplete to be able to offer a coherent analysis. Given the political and institutional changes that followed, we argue that this period holds the key to what we term the Kuznets curse —the tendency in late-developing countries, according to Kuznets, for endogenous social conflicts linked to rapid structural change to be resolved by authoritarian regimes that ensure adherence to the high-savers accumulation model. We explain the political economy of the Kuznets curse through a narrative approach that combines structuralist development economics with a neorealist approach to institutional change, making use of public discourses and debates among policy-makers and intellectual elites. |
| Keywords: | Distribution, Late development, Political economy, Kuznets, Brazil |
| JEL: | D31 D33 E64 J31 N36 O1 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gnv:wpaper:unige:185943 |
| By: | Philip Verwimp |
| Abstract: | The northern provinces of Burundi have suffered from subordination in the education system since independence. This paper shows that the post-war, northern-led regime has chosen a drastic way to reverse that subordination. The national test (Concours National) at the end of primary school is at the heart of the matter. Using the universe of individual test score data which can be used to construct a school-level panel and applying difference-in-differences analysis, the paper shows strong improvements in test scores in northern versus southern schools since the ruling party won an absolute majority in the 2010 elections. Right after, schools situated in very poor, rural areas in the north score as high as schools in non-poor areas of the capital. The paper finds that increased success rates, improved mean test scores and decreased standard deviations are explained by the % of votes at the municipality level obtained by the ruling party in the 2010 parliamentary elections. Controlling for school budget per capita does not change the results. The latter are interpreted in the political economy of education reform in Burundi and considered as a case of ethno-regional favoritism in Africa. |
| Keywords: | Burundi; Elections; Ethno-regional favoritism; School test scores |
| Date: | 2023–10–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulb:ulbeco:2013/371674 |
| By: | Eva Davoine; Joseph Enguehard; Igor Kolesnikov |
| Abstract: | We examine the political costs of taxation in early modern France. We focus on efforts to enforce the salt tax, the rate of which varied across regions. Using a spatial difference-in-discontinuities design, we compare municipalities just inside the high-tax region with those just outside, before and after a reform aimed at curbing illicit salt smuggling. We find that tax enforcement led to a twenty-fold increase in conflicts between taxpayers and the state in municipalities in the high-tax region. This effect persists until the French Revolution, supporting the view that enforcing the salt tax incurred significant political costs. Finally, we document that the likelihood of conflict increases with tax differences between neighboring regions, which we use to derive an upper bound on the political costs of increased tax enforcement in this historical period. |
| Keywords: | taxation, protest, conflict |
| JEL: | D74 H26 H39 K42 N43 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11945 |
| By: | Kay, Benjamin (Federal Reserve Board); Lakdawala, Aeimit (Wake Forest University, Economics Department); Ryngaert, Jane (University of Notre Dame) |
| Abstract: | Using a novel dataset linking professional forecasters in the Wall Street Journal Economic Forecasting Survey to their political affiliations, we document a partisan bias in GDP growth forecasts. Republican-affiliated forecasters project 0.3--0.4 percentage points higher growth when Republicans hold the presidency, relative to Democratic-affiliated forecasters. Forecast accuracy shows a similar partisan pattern: Republican-affiliated forecasters are less accurate under Republican presidents, indicating that partisan optimism impairs predictive performance. This bias appears uniquely in GDP forecasts and does not extend to inflation, unemployment, or interest rates. We explain these findings with a model where forecasters combine noisy signals with politically-influenced priors: because GDP data are relatively more uncertain, priors carry more weight, letting ideology shape growth projections while leaving easier-to-forecast variables unaffected. Noisy information therefore amplifies, rather than substitutes for, heterogeneous political priors, implying that expectation models should account for both information rigidities and belief heterogeneity. Finally, we show that Republican forecasters become more optimistic when tax cuts are salient in public discourse, suggesting that partisan differences reflect divergent beliefs about the economic effects of fiscal policy. |
| Keywords: | partisan bias; professional forecasts; GDP growth forecasts; tax policy expectations |
| JEL: | C53 D72 D84 E37 |
| Date: | 2025–06–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:wfuewp:0127 |
| By: | Margherita Negri; Alessio Romarri |
| Abstract: | We analyze the effect of increased women representation in politics on gender attitudes within the adult UK population, combining 2002-2019 local election results in England with survey responses from Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Survey. Our Regression Discontinuity analysis shows that the election of a female councillor generates a shift towards more conservative gender attitudes in the population. This backlash effect is entirely driven by male respondents and by those more affected by economic insecurity, i.e. unemployed individuals and those more exposed to the import competition with China. Additionally, we find suggestive evidence that the backlash mainly affects attitudes related to the private sphere, rather than views about society at large. The effect on female respondents is very limited, but our results show that the election of a woman raises their support for work-family policies. Importantly, given the context of our analysis, our results are unlikely to be driven by gender differences in policymaking. |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:baf:cbafwp:cbafwp25253 |