|
on Positive Political Economics |
| 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: | 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: | Jirjahn, Uwe (University of Trier); Mohrenweiser, Jens (University of Applied Science Stralsund); Smith, Stephen (George Washington University) |
| Abstract: | Works councils have been often thought to contribute to workplace democracy. However, workplace democracy not only requires that works councils have the power to influence management decisions but also that this institution of establishment-level codetermination itself is based on democratic principles and processes. The most basic procedure of workplace democracy is the participation of workers in works council elections. Against this background, our study provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the factors that are associated with voter turnout in the elections. The study shows that the election procedure, establishment size, atypical employment, learning, type of establishment owner, economic circumstance, and union support have an influence on the turnout rate. We also find evidence that the role of a series of determinants of voter turnout depends on whether or not an establishment is covered by industry-level collective bargaining. |
| Keywords: | works council elections, voting, election procedure, collective bargaining, establishment size, atypical employment, learning, ownership, economic situation |
| JEL: | D72 J50 J51 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18894 |
| By: | Filipe R. Campante; Emilio Depetris-Chauvin; Ruben Durante |
| Abstract: | We study the supply of political communication highlighting perceived threats, using the 2014 Ebola scare as a natural experiment. Analyzing Twitter posts and congressional newsletters from US House and Senate candidates, we find Republicans increased Ebola-related communication, emphasizing negative sentiment and links to immigration. This response was strongest in safe Republican seats, consistent with base signaling. The supply side was active, not reactive: the Republican response did not vary with proximity to diagnosed cases despite concentrated voter anxiety, politician tweets predicted public Ebola activity but not vice-versa, and more intensive messaging correlated with better electoral outcomes, controlling for local conditions. |
| JEL: | D72 D91 P0 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35660 |
| 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 |
| By: | Georgy Egorov; Konstantin Sonin |
| Abstract: | Artificial intelligence is increasingly used for political advice. We study an AI that is better informed about a payoff-relevant state and cares both about accuracy and about the perceived welfare of the individual it advises. The AI then has an incentive to tilt advice toward what the individual would like to believe, altering both the political content and the informativeness of its messages. Sophisticated individuals anticipate this distortion and filter out its predictable political component, yet still learn less because the AI makes its messages less responsive to the state. Individuals who underestimate the incentive instead mistake political accommodation for information, allowing political preferences to distort factual beliefs and generate polarization and radicalization. The model also shows that better-informed individuals receive more informative and less politically tilted advice, while greater sophistication can improve interpretation yet worsen communication itself. Contrary to the familiar echo-chamber intuition, political distortion is mitigated when political preferences and prior beliefs coincide and is most consequential when they diverge. We show how independently varying individuals’ stated preferences and prior beliefs can recover the AI’s responsiveness to the state even when the underlying state cannot be manipulated. |
| JEL: | D72 D83 P00 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35689 |
| 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: | Pierre Bodere; Giulia Brancaccio; Karam Kang |
| Abstract: | Local elected officials oversee critical infrastructure, often with limited electoral accountability. This paper studies how this distorts investment across California drinking-water systems. We document that pollution responds to shifts in the political environment, motivating a dynamic model of public investment. We measure welfare returns to investment directly, combining event-study estimates of investment effectiveness and costs with those of residents’ clean-water valuations, recovered from housing choices. Investment choices identify policymakers’ responsiveness to those returns. Weak accountability diverts investment from high-return systems and conventional policies imperfectly offset these distortions: subsidy takeup is misaligned with returns, while uniform mandates induce welfare losses. |
| JEL: | D72 H41 H54 L0 L95 Q53 R31 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35690 |
| By: | Kerler, Philipp; Doyle, David; Araújo, Victor (University of Reading) |
| Abstract: | The rise of the radical right is often attributed to economic disappointments rooted in structural transformations. However, these explanations frequently fail to extend beyond advanced democracies, where most structural changes differ. To advance the limited understanding of the political effects of structural transformations in countries of the Global South, we study the shift to high-intensity agricultural production in Brazil in the early 2000s. We argue that -- similar to electoral realignment in advanced democracies -- left majoritarian parties (in this case, the Brazilian Workers' Party, PT) losing the support of those left behind by structural change contributed significantly to Jair Bolsonaro's rise to power. At the same time, Bolsonaro's neoliberal appeals around revoking land protection and reducing trade barriers resonated with workers and farmers embedded in increasingly industrialized, export-oriented agriculture. Therefore, Bolsonaro garnered support from the winners and losers of structural transformation simultaneously. Contrary to the protectionist appeals of the radical right in the Global North, our research highlights the distinct role of neoliberal appeals for the success of the radical right in the Global South. |
| Date: | 2026–08–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:4b2e9_v1 |
| By: | Brown, Jacob; Pietrzak, Adrian C.; Sahn, Alexander (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) |
| Abstract: | American cities have rapidly built new homeless service facilities - shelters and supportive housing - over the last decade in response to rising homelessness. We study how voters react to these facilities once they are built and operational, leveraging a pair of statewide ballot propositions to fund new homeless services in California. We find that voters living closest to newly opened facilities became more supportive of spending on homelessness services compared to those living further away. We argue and show using survey data that new shelters increase the salience of homelessness in the minds of voters, driving positive policy feedback. We rule out the effects of positive changes in street conditions, improvements over existing land-uses, and financial self-interest as alternative mechanisms. Our findings suggest that voters can reward policy action and that NIMBY opposition may be more prospective than retrospective. |
| Date: | 2026–08–24 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:2njfm_v1 |
| By: | Roman Horvath (Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic); Eva Horvathova (Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) |
| Abstract: | We study whether ideology can overturn the income-based prediction of redistribution preferences. Using individual-level data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, we compare two cross-pressured groups: poor right-wing and rich left-wing respondents. Rich-left respondents are significantly more supportive of redistribution than poor-right respondents, including within country-wave cells. The findings provide global evidence that ideology can reverse the income-based ranking of preferences for redistribution. |
| Keywords: | redistribution preferences; ideology; income; cross-pressures |
| JEL: | D31 D63 D72 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fau:wpaper:wp2026_28 |
| 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: | Garro, Carmen; Ortega, Fernanda |
| Abstract: | This replication report examines the reproducibility of Vaz et al. (2024), who demonstrate the Cumulative Redundancy Bias (CRB)-the tendency to favor early-leading candidates and to suspect fraud when a late reversal occurs. Using the authors' openly available raw data and analysis code, we successfully reproduced all reported results across seven preregistered studies. The only discrepancy identified was a minor difference in Experiment 5, which did not affect the results of the study. In addition, the authors conducted non-parametric tests for all experiments in the complementary documents. We verified and reported their results, concluding that the authors have followed good practices for the replication of their outcomes. The non-parametric tests support the original findings: early leaders were consistently evaluated more positively, and late-lead scenarios reliably increased perceived manipulation, even when using real election data, presenting results as percentages, providing explanatory information, or accounting for partisanship. The evidence strengthens the conclusion that sequential reporting of partial results can distort perceptions of electoral integrity, underscoring the importance of communication strategies that better convey vote-count dynamics and uncertainty. |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:316 |