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on Positive Political Economics |
| By: | Gardner, Graham (Texas Christian University); McCrary, Kayleigh (University of Richmond); Spencer, Melissa (University of Richmond) |
| Abstract: | Do ballot measures generate spillover effects on voters’ choice of candidates? We examine this question by studying 16 abortion ballot measures in the 2022 and 2024 US general elections. Nationwide electoral returns show that the 2022 measures aided Democrats, but the 2024 measures aided Republicans. These effects are not explained by turnout. Instead, ballot measures incentivize voters to select candidates along margins other than the ballot measure issue. Survey data from 2024 show that moderate voters who preferred abortion rights and had the chance to vote on abortion ballot measures became more likely to vote Republican. |
| Keywords: | abortion, voting, elections |
| JEL: | D72 I18 J13 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18928 |
| By: | Alessandro Belmonte (Department of Economics and Social Sciences - Marche Polytechnic University, Italy); Giuseppe Spataro (Marche Polytechnic University); Davide Ticchi (Department of Economics and Social Sciences - Marche Polytechnic University, Italy) |
| Abstract: | Does information revealing that political elites act against the public interest erode institutional trust and state legitimacy? We examine this question using the Panama Papers, a major disclosure of offshore financial activities involving political leaders and senior public officials worldwide. We construct an original country-level database measuring the timing and intensity of media coverage implicating domestic political figures and combine it with survey data from the Life in Transition Survey, the British Election Study, and Eurobarometer. Across countries, samples, and empirical strategies that identify distinct margins of the scandal, we find that the revelations increased the political salience of taxation and reduced trust in presidents, governments, and parliaments. The reputational consequences thus extended beyond the individuals directly implicated to the institutions through which political authority is exercised, consistent with an erosion of perceived state legitimacy. We also find that the disclosures strengthened support for democracy, suggesting that citizens valued the capacity of democratic institutions and investigative journalism to expose elite misconduct. Yet where domestic political involvement was especially salient, satisfaction with the functioning of democracy declined. |
| Keywords: | State legitimacy, Institutional trust, Democratic assessment, Offshore financial activity. |
| JEL: | D72 D73 H26 L82 P16 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:anc:wpaper:510 |
| By: | Vasiliki Fouka; Marco Tabellini |
| Abstract: | We discuss how immigration affects identity, with implications for politics. We build on key insights from social psychology and their formalization in economics to derive predictions about how immigration changes both self-identification and categorization of others into groups. These immigration-induced identity changes can explain two recent political transformations that have characterized many Western democracies: the rise of right-wing populism and the realignment of voters and parties along a socio-cultural, rather than economic, dimension of political conflict. We also discuss how immigration can reshape group boundaries and political cleavages, depending on the characteristics of immigrants, host populations, and the local context. We highlight open questions and possible directions for future research. |
| JEL: | D72 D91 J15 N32 Z13 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35777 |
| By: | Liu, Kelly J. |
| Abstract: | Affective polarization - marked by strong sympathy for one’s own political party and heightened dislike or distrust toward the opposing party - has emerged as a critical concern in the United States. This study examines the relationship between political advertising on television and such partisan animosity in the United States from 2000 to 2020, drawing on data from the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP) and the American National Election Studies (ANES). I document that advertising volume and affective polarization rise in close tandem over time but find little robust evidence of a straightforward causal link. Two-way fixed effects estimates suggest at most a modest positive correlation, driven primarily by decreased sympathy toward the out-group. Results from a quasi-experimental border pair design, however, point to a small negative effect, most pronounced when focusing on settings with relatively low advertising exposure. For now, these findings indicate that televised election campaigns are unlikely to be a primary driver of mass-level affective polarization. The study highlights methodological challenges and underscores the need for thorough research designs when evaluating the impact of political advertising on partisan sentiments among the electorate. |
| JEL: | D72 D83 M37 P16 |
| Date: | 2026–09–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bsl:wpaper:2026/08 |
| By: | Jesús Fernández-Villaverde; Carlos Sanz |
| Abstract: | How socially distinct are competing political parties' candidate pools? Since names encode cultural milieu, lineage, linguistic origin, and ancestry that standard socioeconomic variables miss, we measure social sorting across parties with names, predicting affiliation out of sample within municipality-years. Across more than 2.5 million local-election candidates, names pick the right-wing candidate in a random within-municipality pair 55.8% of the time in Spain and 56.5% in France. Given names alone do most of the work: around 55.0%. Under a stylized model of intergenerational transmission of political orientation, this translates to an implied gap of about 25 p.p. in parental naming propensities. The signal is stable in Spain but doubles in France by 2026. Within ideological families, names separate parties as sharply as across the right-left divide, even more so in France. The Spanish cleavage is linguistic and growing. The French one runs through names of immigrant origin and is strongest in large cities. |
| Keywords: | political selection, social sorting, political cleavages, party candidates, machine learning prediction |
| JEL: | D72 J15 Z13 C53 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13005 |
| By: | Ajzenman, Nicolas (McGill University); Aksoy, Cevat Giray (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development); Pickard, Harry (Newcastle University) |
| Abstract: | Populists govern more of the world’s countries than at any point in the past century, on both the right and the left. What they share is not an economic programme but a worldview that casts politics as a struggle between ordinary citizens and a self-serving establishment, a conflict that is zero-sum at its core. We show that exposure to this political environment leaves a durable imprint on citizens’ beliefs. Combining data on populist leaders with surveys of more than 260, 000 respondents in 53 countries, we exploit within-country-survey-year variation across birth cohorts and find that greater exposure during early adulthood is associated with stronger zerosum beliefs later in life. The result is replicated in two independent surveys and across multiple measures of zero-sum thinking and perceived economic conflict and persists into respondents’ mid-forties. The mechanism evidence provides little support for an economic-scarcity explanation and instead points towards a rhetorical channel, as populist rule features substantially more anti-elite rhetoric in two independent measures and more domestic zero-sum framing in United Nations speeches. |
| Keywords: | populism, zero-sum beliefs, political socialisation, belief formation |
| JEL: | D72 P16 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18929 |
| By: | Sabet, Navid; Yuchtman, Noam |
| Abstract: | We empirically identify politically-motivated redistricting and its consequences, studying the effects of changed electorate composition on US congressional district boundaries and on political outcomes. We exploit the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized millions of immigrants, changing local electorates without changing demographics— legalized immigrants were already counted in the census. Where Democrats controlled the 1990 redistricting process, higher IRCA populations were associated with more spatially distorted districts. Consistent with theory, Democrats packed Hispanics(their ardent supporters) into majority-minority districts. House delegations had more Hispanics suggesting that partisan gerrymandering, in this case, increased representation among the historically underrepresented. |
| Keywords: | gerrymandering;minority political representation;immigrant legalization;state governance |
| JEL: | D70 P00 J10 |
| Date: | 2025–09–19 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:126163 |
| By: | Jamshidi, Jamshid |
| Abstract: | The Islamic Republic of Iran dissolved its only ruling party in 1987 and has governed its provinces ever since without the organisation that comparative politics treats as essential to durable authoritarian rule. Yet elections have been held continuously, elites have circulated at extraordinary rates---roughly two in three parliamentary incumbents and four in five city councillors are replaced each cycle---and mass participation has persisted, with some 273, 000 candidates registering for a single round of local elections. This article asks how political coordination is accomplished at the subnational level in the structural absence of party organisation. Drawing on original electoral data covering all eleven parliamentary terms and on remote qualitative fieldwork in Khuzestan Province, it argues that durable, territorially embedded informal networks---kinship and tribal structures, religious associations, patronage hierarchies, and economic coalitions---perform the coordinating functions normally attributed to ruling parties. Read through Gramsci's account of hegemony and the integral state, these networks constitute decentralised sites of consent production that complement, rather than replace, coercive and institutional power. The case of Dezful illustrates the mechanism. The argument specifies a model of network-based hegemony with implications for the study of authoritarian durability, party substitution, and informal institutions beyond Iran. |
| Date: | 2026–09–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:chpx5_v1 |
| By: | Emeline Bezin (CREM-UMR6111); Maxence Gerard (CREM-UMR6111); Ingmar Schumacher (University of Birmingham) |
| Abstract: | How will urban growth affect the long-run environment? This paper focuses on an overlooked channel: how urbanization shapes environmental values and, with them, political support for environmental protection. Our theory combines two mechanisms: the extinction of experience documented by conservation science, whereby reduced contact with nature erodes attachment to it, and a cultural transmission process involving rational socialization decisions. Both are embedded in an overlapping-generations model with rural–urban migration and voting over environmental policy. When the extinction of experience dominates, urbanization erodes support for environmental protection. However, when socialization is effective, the picture reverses: the interaction between location and socialization choices gives rise to a process of cultural dissemination through which urbanization raises environmental values. Our main theoretical predictions are consistent with a set of stylized facts on environmental preferences, residential location, and policy support that we document using data from the International Social Survey Programme. |
| Keywords: | Urbanization, political economy, environmental values, cultural transmission, extinction of experience |
| JEL: | Q58 D72 Z13 R11 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bir:birmec:26-05 |
| By: | Heinz, Frederik R. |
| Abstract: | Debates on democratic backsliding have prompted public administration scholars, notably Kutsal Yesilkagit and Michael Bauer, to argue that administrations facing illiberal populism must abandon neutrality and actively resist — even against electoral majorities. This paper examines Bauer's recent attempt to ground such resistance in Hegel's philosophy of right, which recasts bureaucracy as an ethical mediator embodying practical reason rather than a mere instrument of political rule. Through a close reading of Hegel's original text, this paper argues that Bauer's Hegelian turn imports more than a theory of administrative ethics: it imports Hegel's broader project of a "sovereignty of reason" directed against arbitrariness in politics as such, not merely against its populist variant. Read against contemporary diagnoses that locate liberalism's crisis in excessive depoliticization rather than its absence, this suggests that Bauer's strategy risks reinforcing the very populist grievances it seeks to counter. The paper concludes by outlining the need for a normative foundation of public administration that supports a politics of freedom without positioning itself against politics itself. |
| Date: | 2026–09–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:hnjcw_v1 |
| By: | Malte Baader (Norwegian School of Economics, FAIR); Kai Barron (ESCP Business School, WZB Berlin); Anna Hochleitner (Norwegian School of Economics, FAIR, SNF); Jonas P. Kaiser (TU Berlin, Berlin School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | In two studies using AI-assisted qualitative interviews, we ask a representative sample of the German electorate (N = 1, 013) to reflect on the most important societal events of the last 15 years. We document that far-right supporters construct systematically different narratives about the recent past. First, they recall different events—with a strong focus on migration-related issues. Second, even when they do consider the same events, they are more likely to blame the establishment and describe events more negatively and with greater emotional intensity. We further document that these narratives are associated with policy preferences, and that far right supporters are more inclined than supporters of other parties to prioritize cultural over economic issues. Together, our findings reveal that partisan divides extend to how citizens remember and interpret shared national experiences. |
| Keywords: | polarization; narratives; ai-assisted qualitative interviews; explanations; mental models; |
| JEL: | D01 C90 D84 |
| Date: | 2026–09–18 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rco:dpaper:586 |