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on Positive Political Economics |
| By: | Green, Elliott; Harding, Robin |
| Abstract: | The literature on Political Business Cycles (PBCs) has suffered from two limitations, namely a dominant focus on government policies rather than outcomes that could influence voter behaviour, and a lack of attention to the relationship between PBCs and democratization. Using multiple fine-grained data on objective and subjective outcomes we examine the nature of PBCs in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region which has experienced substantial levels of democratization in recent decades. We demonstrate clear evidence for the existence of PBCs in Sub-Saharan Africa and that the nature of the PBC changes with democratization. Specifically, we show that PBCs in non-democracies focus more on the provision of private goods and less on public goods, with this reversing as countries democratize. These findings, which hold across data sources and are robust to various specifications, have important implications for our understanding of the link between elections and development outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. |
| Keywords: | African politics; democratization and regime change; elections; public opinion; voting behavior |
| JEL: | D72 H41 H54 N47 |
| Date: | 2026–05–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138370 |
| By: | Eric Chyn; Katherine Cohen; Kareem Haggag; Bryan A. Stuart |
| Abstract: | In the United States, long hailed as the land of opportunity, is access to political office truly open across society, or do the most privileged children disproportionately rise to enter political life? This question speaks to a longstanding concern that elite families may entrench themselves in positions of power, reproducing a form of hereditary privilege within a democratic system. We study the family backgrounds of U.S. politicians over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and show that children from wealthy and privileged households have been substantially overrepresented in elected office. This imbalance has changed little over time and, at the highest levels of office, varies little across political parties. To test whether political access depends on family resources, we exploit the sudden economic shock caused by the end of slavery. Despite the large and concentrated losses at the top of the wealth distribution, the children of slaveholders continued to enter government at high rates. Finally, we examine whether politicians' socioeconomic origins shape policy by constructing a new sample of close elections linked to detailed information on U.S. House candidates' family backgrounds. Comparing otherwise similar districts in which a candidate from a high socioeconomic status family narrowly wins rather than loses, we find that districts represented by higher status candidates are less likely to support pro-tax positions in roll-call voting. Together, the evidence across our analyses shows that family background strongly predicts entry into political office and has measurable consequences for policy choices. |
| JEL: | H10 H70 J45 J62 P16 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35180 |
| By: | David McCune; E. E. Naber |
| Abstract: | We study ballot exhaustion in multiwinner single transferable vote (STV) elections using a dataset of 1, 070 Scottish local government elections comprising over 5.4 million ballots. While ballot exhaustion has been studied extensively in single-winner elections, comparatively little work examines exhaustion in the multiwinner setting. We introduce formal definitions of several types of exhaustion in STV elections, distinguishing between exhausted ballots, non-first-choice exhausted ballots, unrepresented exhausted ballots, and weight exhaustion. These definitions clarify important conceptual differences between ballots that cease to transfer and ballots that fail to contribute meaningfully to representation. Our empirical analysis shows that 27.9\% of ballots are exhausted by the final round of counting, although the corresponding weight exhaustion rate is only 7.1\%, indicating that many exhausted ballots have already contributed to the election of a candidate. Moreover, most exhausted ballots correspond to voters who achieve some form of representation, either because their first-ranked candidate wins or because a candidate ranked among their top choices is elected. These results suggest that raw exhaustion rates alone substantially overstate the extent to which voters lose their influence or fail to obtain representation under STV. We also investigate whether exhaustion can affect electoral outcomes by extending partial ballots under several completion models. Under extreme assumptions, exhaustion can potentially alter a substantial number of outcomes, but under a proportional ballot-completion model only 3.5\% of seats change. Finally, we show that a substantial number of winners fail to reach quota, even after the elimination of all losing candidates. These results help clarify the practical and normative significance of ballot exhaustion in real-world STV elections. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.12676 |
| By: | Matthias Rodemeier; Gregory Sun |
| Abstract: | We study how Americans trade off the welfare of the poor versus the rich using incentivized transfer experiments. Combining this with estimates of the Elasticity of Taxable Income, we quantify optimal income tax rates in the US. Revealed preferences show strong concern for the poor across the political spectrum, implying tax rates far more progressive than existing political agendas. This creates a puzzle: individuals vote for policies that are less progressive than their distributive preferences imply. We trace this puzzle to aversion toward government-mediated redistribution. Liberals’ support for very progressive tax rates is dampened by misuse of public funds, while conservatives object to taxation on principled grounds tied to coercion and property rights. Our paper illustrates that disagreement over redistribution mostly reflects disagreement over institutions rather than over helping the poor. |
| Keywords: | income taxation, redistributive preferences, social welfare weights, government aversion, political economy |
| JEL: | D63 D72 D90 H21 H30 P35 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12645 |
| By: | Christian Koch; Jean-Robert Tyran |
| Abstract: | Radical Right (RR) political parties have become increasingly radicalized on immigration across many developed countries. We study whether exposure to slanted (i.e., one-sided) news shifts policy views of RR voters on immigration in Austria. In an online experiment, participants received slanted news about the effects of immigration on the welfare state. We find that anti-immigration news further radicalizes RR voters by reinforcing extreme policy views, while slanted pro-immigration news has no de-radicalizing effect. Surprisingly, balanced news — presenting both sides — reduces radicalization. We show that balanced news coverage increases trust, thereby increasing RR voters’ receptiveness to opposing viewpoints. |
| Keywords: | radical right voters, fiscal impact of immigration, anti-immigration views, trust in news media, online experiment |
| JEL: | C90 D72 F22 H30 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12659 |
| By: | Michal Brzezinski (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences) |
| Abstract: | Cultural heterogeneity—the within-country dispersion of values measured across hundreds of survey items—predicts populist voting across 60 democracies from 1970 to 2019. I compute fractionalization and polarization indices on Integrated Values Survey value items and regress three populism measures on these indices in a dynamic two-way fixed-effects panel with country-level clustering. A one-within-country-standard-deviation increase in cultural polarization is associated with a rise in vote-weighted ideational populism of about 14\ robust to system-GMM and to a sensitivity analysis for selection on unobservables. A V-Party-based GAL–TAN decomposition shows that the mobilization skews toward culturally-authoritarian parties, with no detectable movement in the progressive-libertarian camp. Including behavioral items in the heterogeneity measure eliminates the effect; the values-versus-behaviors boundary is empirically decisive. |
| Keywords: | populism, cultural heterogeneity, fractionalization, polarization, GAL–TAN |
| JEL: | D72 Z13 P16 C23 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:war:wpaper:2026-12 |
| By: | Luca V.A. Colombo; Michele Magnani; Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato |
| Abstract: | In the early 1920s, Italian fascism grew from a marginal group into an organized party capable of challenging incumbent political forces and precipitating democratic backsliding. A key driver of this expansion was the strategic use of violence by squads that moved across municipalities to strike opponents and local institutions. We show that road networks were central to the diffusion of fascist violence: by lowering travel times and facilitating rapid incursions, roads made violence harder to anticipate and more effective. We document that such violence profoundly altered local political institutions, accelerating the consolidation of fascist control within a few years. |
| JEL: | D74 N44 N74 P16 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1222 |
| By: | Wei, Zhiwu; Luca, Davide; Lee, Neil; Rodríguez-Pose, Andrés |
| Abstract: | The political consequences of inequality have become a matter of mounting concern. Relative deprivation theory posits that frustration arising from comparisons with proximate reference groups can fuel protests. Yet research has concentrated overwhelmingly on the Global North, notwithstanding the acute wealth disparities experienced by the majority of the world’s population in the Global South. To address this gap, we assemble novel, fine-grained estimates of relative wealth at the 2.4 km × 2.4 km grid level to derive measures of local wealth inequality, which we link to over 645, 000 georeferenced protest events recorded from 2014 to 2018. Exploiting variation within subnational regions, we document a robust, positive association between local wealth inequality and protest incidence. We show that the inequality–protest relationship is anchored in individuals’ immediate surroundings. As the spatial radius defining ‘local’ expands, the association weakens, highlighting the primacy of experienced inequality. We also find that the inequality-protest link is mediated by national characteristics. The study advances the social sciences by furnishing novel empirical evidence on the micro-geographic underpinnings of political instability, demonstrating that inequality’s political effects hinge on proximity, local class structure and national institutional environment. |
| Keywords: | protest; inequality; wealth; Global South; subnational analysis |
| JEL: | N0 |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:137937 |
| By: | Eugen Dimant; Michele Gelfand; Anna Hochleitner; Silvia Sonderegger |
| Abstract: | Social sanctions sustain social order by reinforcing widely accepted principles. Political polarization may weaken this mechanism by fragmenting these principles, yet causal effects are hard to identify: observational data cannot separate the effect of polarized preferences from exposure to polarization. We model theoretically and test experimentally the effectiveness of social sanctions in a representative U.S. sample (N = 2, 400) that exogenously varies environmental polarization. Participants allocate money between politically opposed recipients privately and publicly, and public allocations can be punished by partisan Observers drawn from distributions varying in their degree of polarization. With greater polarization, public allocations become less equitable because participants (correctly) expect punishment even when acting fairly. This shows that polarization causally undermines the disciplining role of social sanctions. |
| Keywords: | polarization, social punishment, equitable behavior |
| JEL: | C91 D01 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12660 |
| By: | Jackson, James; Larsen, Mathias |
| Abstract: | As China increasingly leads the world in green industries, the country is a critical case for the debate on climate change in political economy. While climate change is now less of a blind spot than previously, the debate is obstructed by an inadequate grasp of the complexities of China, stemming from the disciplinary isolation of ‘China studies’ and the political isolation of the country itself. In this commentary, we address this problem by presenting a structured approach to understanding the case of China. We distill insights from different literature to offer an account of the political economy of China’s green transition, centering on three key insights. As umbrella terms that work as shorthands for summarizing the three literatures, we propose that China can be understood as: (1) ‘green authoritarianism’ – a political model that conceptualizes the political motives and processes underlying China’s climate governance. (2) ‘green state-steering’ - central-local-private relations that combine top-down and bottom-up approaches to advance climate priorities. (3) ‘green economic planning’ - an approach to industrial policy, such as the ‘Made In China 2025 Strategy’, that guides and organizes climate governance over time. Our intention is that these insights can help connect the scholarship on China with the scholarship on the political economy of climate change by facilitating non-China specialists in both drawing from and relating their work to the country. |
| Keywords: | China; climate change; Authoritarianism; Economic planning; green transition; Political economy |
| JEL: | N0 R14 J01 |
| Date: | 2026–04–16 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138302 |
| By: | Lafleur, Jean-Michel; Marfouk, Abdeslam |
| Abstract: | Migration has become a highly contentious issue across many European countries, where initiatives to regularize the status of undocumented migrants face substantial political opposition. While public attitudes toward immigration have been extensively studied, comparatively little attention has been paid to public opinion on large-scale regularization programs (i.e., the granting of legal status) and the role of framing in shaping support for such policies. To address this gap, we conducted an experimental study to examine how different framing strategies influence public support for regularization policies in Belgium. Our results show that emotionally engaging messages and narrative presentations of factual information increase support for the regularization of undocumented migrants, especially those who are employed. From a public policy perspective, these findings suggest that framing can help policymakers build public support for regularization programs. |
| Keywords: | International Migration, Regularization of Undocumented Immigrants, Public Opinion, Public Policy, Survey Experiment |
| JEL: | F22 J61 J68 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1758 |
| By: | Sharif, Sally; Schwarz, Christopher |
| Abstract: | Arguing against prior theories that democratization has no impact on income inequality, Dorsch and Maarek (2019) contend in an APSR article that democratization causes extreme income distributions to move towards a "middle ground, " reducing inequality in highly unequal autocracies while increasing inequality in relatively egalitarian ones. Central to the study’s evidence is an instrumental variable strategy that leverages the regional share of democracies, and its interaction with initial inequality levels, to identify both the effect of democratization and the democracy–inequality interaction. We provide a critical replication of this study, making two central contributions. First, we show that the generated instrument violates the exclusion restriction and, second, even when properly constructed, the same linear function cannot be used to identify two causal effects. We then demonstrate how the same source of exogenous variation can be used to identify multiple causal effects using a generalized additive model, with non-linearities in the first stages serving as additional instruments. Across all specifications, the data do not support the middle‑ground theory proposed by the authors: neither democracy nor its interaction with initial inequality has a statistically significant effect on the Gini coefficient. Our findings are consistent with an extensive literature in economics and political science that has struggled to uncover a systematic democracy–inequality link. The replication method we employ offers a practical tool for other studies in contexts where valid instruments are scarce or the exclusion restriction is difficult to satisfy. |
| Date: | 2026–05–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:ztw7y_v1 |