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on Positive Political Economics |
| By: | Naruki Notsu (Osaka School of International Public Policy, The University of Osaka); Asahi Semma (Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting Co., Ltd.); Shuko Harada (Osaka School of International Public Policy, The University of Osaka) |
| Abstract: | This study examines how the complete absence of electoral competition shapes politicians’ behavior. To explore this, we focus on mayoral elections in Japanese municipalities, a setting where uncontested elections are a common and politically important phenomenon. Using the variation in uncontested elections across municipalities at each election year, we examine subsequent changes in mayors’ salaries. We find that mayors who win office without a contest subsequently increase their salaries. The pattern also extends to pivotal stakeholders. These findings suggest that when public conflicts, such as the existence of other candidates, do not exist, politicians are more likely to seek personal gain, highlighting the fundamental role of elections in disciplining officeholders. |
| Keywords: | Uncontested elections, Politicians’ behavior, Political rent, No competition |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osp:wpaper:25e004 |
| By: | Kansikas, Carolina (University of Warwick); Bagues, Manuel (University of Warwick) |
| Abstract: | We study whether term limits can accelerate women’s access to top political positions by analyzing two reforms in Italian local elections that extended mayoral term limits from two to three five-year terms. In a period marked by rapid growth in women’s political participation, the first reform affected municipalities with fewer than 3, 000 inhabitants in 2014, and the second those below 5, 000 in 2022. Using a difference-in-discontinuities design, we find that longer term limits restrict opportunities for early-career politicians, with substantial effects for female representation: the share of female mayors would be 8 percentage points higher without the term limit extensions. The impact is larger in municipalities with more women in lower political positions and where gender quotas for council members are present, suggesting that entry-level quotas can be more effective when paired with policies promoting turnover in top positions. |
| Keywords: | Term limits ; female political representation ; Italian local elections JEL Codes: J16 ; J18 ; J48 ; D72 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wrk:warwec:1573 |
| By: | Santiago López Moskovits (Department of Economics, Universidad de San Andrés) |
| Abstract: | This thesis exploits the 2014–15 Flint Water Crisis as a quasi-natural experiment to examine how a severe public health and governance failure affects electoral participation. Leveraging precinct-level turnout data for gubernatorial and presidential elections in Genesee County (1998–2020), I employ an event-study difference-in differences design with fixed effects and controls for population and partisan composition. I find that, relative to neighboring precincts, voter turnout in Flint City declined by between 20 to 30% in the elections immediately following the crisis, a pattern that persists but loses statistical significance under “honest” bounds (Rambachan & Roth 2023) and synthetic DiD (Arkhangelsky et al. 2021) robustness checks. A parallel analysis of Republican vote share fails the pre-trend test, suggesting greater volatility in party support. These results highlight how a cute institutional failure can erode democratic engagement, even in voluntary voting systems. The findings contribute to the literature on political behavior by providing causal evidence that exogenous shocks to public trust and welfare can suppress turnout, with implications for debates on accountability and institutional resilience. |
| Keywords: | Voter turnout, corruption, ecological disasters, institutions |
| JEL: | H75 P10 P16 C23 |
| Date: | 2025–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sad:ypaper:16 |
| By: | Matilda Gettins; Lorenz Meister |
| Abstract: | Populist parties increasingly deploy narratives of social injustice to portray climate policy as elitist and unfair. This paper investigates how such narratives affect public attitudes toward populism and democratic institutions. We conduct a survey experiment with approximately 1, 600 respondents in Germany, exposing participants to three common narratives about the distributional costs of climate policy. Our findings show that the narrative emphasizing disproportionate burdens on low-income households significantly increases climate-populist attitudes and reduces satisfaction with democracy. These effects are particularly pronounced among low-income, East German, and conservative voters. By contrast, the narrative that companies can circumvent the cost of climate action fosters climate populism among left-leaning individuals. The results suggest that the framing of how the costs of climate policy are distributed strongly shapes its political acceptance and vulnerability to populist mobilization. |
| Keywords: | Climate policy, populism, narratives, distribution |
| JEL: | Q54 D72 Q58 H23 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp2139 |
| By: | Pau Balart (Universitat de les Illes Balears); Agustín Casas (Universidad CUNEF); Gerard Doménech-Gironell (University of Padova); Orestis Troumpounis (Ca Foscari University of Venice) |
| Abstract: | This paper develops a formal model of electoral competition in which parties first choose their platforms and then allocate campaign resources that serve both persuasive and mobilization purposes. Voters, in turn, endogenously sort into ideological and impressionable types. We characterize a unique subgame perfect equilibrium and derive comparative statics that illustrate how the returns to mobilization and persuasion shape equilibrium platforms, campaign spending, and turnout. Among other results, we show that while campaign spending and polarization do not necessarily move in the same direction, turnout consistently increases with polarization. |
| Keywords: | electoral competition, campaign spending, polarization, mobilization |
| JEL: | D72 |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aoz:wpaper:371 |
| By: | Sebastian Schweighofer-Kodritsch; Steffen Huck; Macartan Humphreys |
| Abstract: | We introduce political salience into a canonical model of attacks against political regimes, as scaling agents’ expressive payoffs from taking sides. Equilibrium balances heterogeneous expressive concerns with material bandwagoning incentives. We examine comparative statics in salience that fully characterize the stability of equilibria. A main insight is that when regime sanctions are weak, increases from low to middling salience can pose the greatest threat to regimes – even very small shocks can suffice to drastically escalate attacks. Our results speak to the charged debates about democracy, by identifying conditions under which heightened interest in political decision-making can pose a threat to democracy in and of itself. |
| Keywords: | political conflict, salience, democracy, sanctions |
| JEL: | C72 D74 D91 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12116 |
| By: | Riley K. Acton; Emily Cook; Paola A. Ugalde |
| Abstract: | We examine the role of students’ political views in shaping college enrollment decisions in the United States. We hypothesize that students derive utility from attending institutions aligned with their political identities, which could reinforce demographic and regional disparities in educational attainment and reduce ideological diversity on campuses. Using four decades of survey data on college freshmen, we document increasing political polarization in colleges’ student bodies, which is not fully explained by sorting along demographic, socioeconomic, or academic lines. To further explore these patterns, we conduct a series of survey-based choice experiments that quantify the value students place on political alignment relative to factors such as cost and proximity. We find that both liberal and conservative students prefer institutions with more like-minded peers and, especially, with fewer students from the opposite side of the political spectrum. The median student is willing to pay up to $2, 617 (12.5%) more to attend a college where the share of students with opposing political views is 10 percentage points lower, suggesting that political identity plays a meaningful role in the college choice process. |
| Keywords: | college choice, polarization, politics, higher education |
| JEL: | I20 I23 J1 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12113 |
| By: | Masahiko ASANO; Yoshikuni ONO; Yuya ENDO |
| Abstract: | Voters hold gender-based stereotypes of male and female candidates and often evaluate them on these grounds. This bias extends beyond policy areas to personality traits, with many voters stereotyping male candidates as tough and aggressive while expecting female candidates to be gentle, compassionate, and likable. Existing research indicates that female candidates adopt strategic behaviors during election campaigns, utilizing more positive and less negative emotive language than their male counterparts. This study examined whether these gender differences also manifest in candidates’ facial expressions during election campaigns. Our analysis of campaign pictures used by over 10, 000 candidates in Japan’s national elections from 1996 to 2024 revealed that female candidates smiled more often than their male counterparts. Moreover, female candidates received fewer votes when they did not smile in their campaign photos. These findings suggest that female candidates are strategically motivated to conform to gender-typical behaviors to appeal to voters and avoid electoral backlash. |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eti:dpaper:25088 |
| By: | Natalia Jiménez-Jiménez (Universidad Pablo de Olavide); Elena Molis-Bañales (Universidad de Granada); Ángel Solano-García (Universidad de Granada) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we analyze theoretically and experimentally the relationship of tax avoidance and voting decisions over the size of taxation. We propose a basic model of redistributive politics in which there are two types of voters (skilled and unskilled workers) and two exogenous tax schemes to vote for. We design a laboratory experiment to test the results of the model. We consider a control treatment where tax avoidance is not feasible. In the main treatments, only the high skilled workers are allowed to avoid taxes with a fixed cost that varies in two different treatments. We also consider two additional treatments with explicit or implicit information about tax avoidance decisions. The impossibility of tax avoidance favors the support for the high tax rate. A sufficiently high cost of tax avoidance makes unskilled workers vote mostly for a low tax rate and skilled workers opt for almost no tax avoidance. Nevertheless, if tax avoidance is cheap enough, a higher than predicted proportion of unskilled workers still vote for the low tax rate, even in a high tax avoidance context. The only effect of information occurs when the cost of tax avoidance is low, and it entails a decrease in tax avoidance levels. Finally, regardless the tax avoidance cost, a higher rate of tax avoidance yields to a higher likelihood of unskilled workers voting for the high tax rate, and, vice versa, a higher probability of voting for the high tax rate results in a higher tax avoidance level. |
| Keywords: | tax avoidance; voting; income inequality; real-effort task; information. |
| JEL: | C92 D72 H26 H30 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pab:wpaper:25.07 |
| By: | Miriam Malament (Department of Economics, Universidad de San Andrés) |
| Abstract: | Do symbolic penalties work? This paper provides causal evidence that even minimal, unenforced legal sanctions can influence civic behavior. I study a 2012 reform in Argentina that introduced optional voting for 16- to 17-year-olds, while voting from age 18 remained compulsory and formally subject to a small, unindexed fine of 50 pesos. Using a regression discontinuity design and administrative data from 15 national elections between 2015 and 2023, I find that turnout increases by about 20 percentage points at age 18, despite negligible enforcement. Complementary evidence from national survey data suggests this effect reflects expressive compliance: symbolic penalties act as normative signals, activating a sense of civic duty rather than deterring through material sanctions. The response is especially pronounced among lower-income and lower-education youth. These findings offer rare causal evidence that symbolic penalties can shape civic behavior by appealing to internalized civic norms rather than fear of punishment. |
| Keywords: | elections, compulsory voting, Argentina, regression discontinuity design |
| JEL: | D72 C31 K10 Z13 P16 |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sad:ypaper:17 |
| By: | Patrick Lederer |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we study voting rules on the interval domain, where the alternatives are arranged according to an externally given strict total order and voters report intervals of this order to indicate the alternatives they support. For this setting, we introduce and characterize the class of position-threshold rules, which compute a collective position of the voters with respect to every alternative and choose the left-most alternative whose collective position exceeds its threshold value. Our characterization of these rules mainly relies on reinforcement, a well-known population consistency condition, and robustness, a new axiom that restricts how the outcome is allowed to change when a voter removes the left-most or right-most alternative from his interval. Moreover, we characterize a generalization of the median rule to the interval domain, which selects the median of the endpoints of the voters' intervals. |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2509.04874 |
| By: | Claudio Ferraz; Frederico Finan |
| Abstract: | This chapter examines why democracies in the developing world frequently underperform in providing effective governance. We argue that these shortcomings stem from weaknesses in accountability mechanisms, which leave governments vulnerable to corruption, clientelism, and elite capture. Our framework distinguishes three accountability channels: vertical (citizens’ control over politicians), horizontal (checks and balances across state institutions), and diagonal (oversight by media and civil society). We synthesize the recent theoretical and empirical literature to assess how each channel operates, the conditions under which it succeeds, and why it often fails. A central finding is that accountability institutions rarely fail on their own; instead, they are actively undermined by political actors seeking to preserve rents and entrench power. This dynamic weakens electoral competition, erodes judicial independence, and curtails media freedom, producing a mutually reinforcing cycle of weak accountability. Additionally, we argue that sustainable reforms cannot be achieved by strengthening any single channel in isolation. Since vertical, horizontal, and diagonal accountability are interdependent, effective reform requires bolstering all three simultaneously. We conclude by discussing the implications of this perspective for future research, including the role of new technologies, political polarization, and candidate selection in reshaping accountability in developing democracies. |
| JEL: | D72 H11 K42 O43 P50 |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34198 |
| By: | Gaia Dossi; Marta Morando |
| Abstract: | We document that inventors patent and cite technologies aligned with the views of their political party. We link inventors to US voter registration data and map politically polarized issues to technologies. Compared to Republicans, Democrats are one-third more likely to patent technologies addressing climate change mitigation or women's reproductive health and one-third less likely to patent weapons. This holds across economic returns and organization characteristics. Republicans and Democrats are also 20% differently likely to cite these technologies. These findings highlight the importance of inventors' identity - specifically, their party affiliation - in shaping the content and diffusion of their innovation. |
| Keywords: | Diffusion, Innovation, Partisanship, Polarisation, Polarization |
| Date: | 2025–08–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2116 |
| By: | Forslund, Eva (Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets (Misum)); Meriläinen, Jaako (Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets (Misum)); Zipfel, Celine (Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets (Misum)) |
| Abstract: | We provide new evidence on how a gender-biased, labor-saving technology—the milking machine—advanced one important dimension of gender equality: women’s political representation. Our focus is mid-20th-century Finland, where mechanized milking reduced the time burden of a task traditionally performed by women and facilitated modernization of rural parts of the country. Using historical data, we estimate panel and instrumental-variable models that exploit temporal variation in the spread of milking machines and geographic variation in pre-determined comparative advantage in cattle farming. We find that municipalities with greater adoption of milking machines experienced significantly larger increases in the share of local council seats held by women between 1950 and 1972. These effects operated through time savings, rural economic development, and an increase in women’s employment off the farm, which together helped ease key constraints to women's political representation. |
| Keywords: | agriculture; gender; political representation; technological change; women in politics |
| JEL: | D63 |
| Date: | 2025–09–15 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:hamisu:2025_002 |
| By: | Oswaldo Mena Aguilar |
| Abstract: | This article examines how partisanship and other political determinants influenced disposable and market income inequality in Latin America from 1990 to 2022. Using three separate sources of data, it finds that left partisanship is consistently associated with lower levels of both market and disposable income inequality (pre distribution and redistribution respectively) within one- and four-years. It also finds an independent and consistent negative effect of social mobilization. The paper makes several contributions. First, it advances the concept of pre distribution in the study of partisanship and inequality, extending scarce existing empirical analysis into and beyond the Pink Tide and commodity boom era. Second, it codes partisanship at the presidential level, rather than the more common measure of cumulative legislative power, offering an indicator more aligned to Latin America’s presidential systems. Third, it triangulates results across SEDLAC, SWIID, and LIS data, reinforcing confidence in the robustness of the core findings. |
| Date: | 2025–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lis:liswps:902 |
| By: | MacInnis, Bo; Krosnick, Jon A. (Resources for the Future) |
| Abstract: | In Climate Insights 2024: Americans Understanding of Climate Change, we showed that huge majorities of Americans believe that the earth has been warming; that this warming is due to human activity; and that governments, businesses, and individuals should take steps to address it. In Climate Insights 2024: American Climate Policy Opinions, we described how large majorities of Americans favor various policies for mitigating future global warming. Yet, these mitigation policies cannot be achieved without many Democrats, Independents, and Republicans agreeing.In this report, we assess the degree to which Democrats, Independents, and Republicans agree on various aspects of climate change and climate change policy in 2024. We then use data from prior surveys in our series to track changes in the partisan gap over the past two decades.In recent years, American partisans have been contemptuous of their opponents. According to a national survey conducted by Gallup in 2023, many more Democrats than Republicans held an unfavorable view of the Republican Party (93 percent vs. 13 percent). Likewise, many more Republicans than Democrats viewed the Democratic Party unfavorably (95 percent vs. 7 percent) (Saad 2023). |
| Date: | 2024–10–22 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rff:report:rp-24-21 |