Positive Political Economics http://lists.repec.org/mailman/listinfo/nep-pol Positive Political Economics 2026-09-28 The Electoral Effects of U.S. Prison Construction https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:dnwke_v1&r=&r=pol From 1980 to 2000, the United States opened over 400 prisons, a rapid expansion of carceral capacity mirroring the punitive turn in public policy and public opinion. Yet few studies have examined the impact of prison construction on nearby residents and their political behavior. We develop a theoretical model tracing how prison openings affect economic, attitudinal, and electoral outcomes in surrounding communities. Using modern difference-in-difference methods and a novel county-level dataset covering forty years of prison openings, we find that prison construction decreases county-level vote share for Republican candidates, especially if Republicans represented the county during prison construction. Drawing on analyses of economic outcomes and prison bond measure support, we argue that voters sanction issue-owning Republican candidates for negative economic externalities and turn against funding for prisons. These findings challenge conventional wisdom about the political economy of prisons and have implications for how we understand contemporary expansions of carceral capacity. Ottone, Nicholas Weiss, Amanda 2026-09-17 Power at Home, Power at the Polls: Gender Turnout Gap in Argentine Presidential Elections https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aoz:wpaper:407&r=&r=pol This paper examines whether gender differences in the labor market explain the gender turnout gap in Argentine congressional elections. Using a unique dataset of actual voting records disaggregated by gender, derived from Argentina's historical system of gender-segregated polling stations, in use until 2007, we construct a provincial panel covering 23 districts and eight biennial congressional elections from 1993 to 2007. Unlike the overwhelming majority of studies in this literature, our data come not from surveys but from official electoral records, which avoids the well-known biases associated with self-reported turnout. The key explanatory variable is women's income as a share of total household income, a continuous measure of female economic autonomy at the provincial level. Estimated using two-way fixed effects with province and year effects and clustered standard errors and confirmed by an instrumental variables strategy that addresses endogeneity, we find that a higher female income share is robustly and positively associated with a larger female turnout advantage. The result is consistent with the resource and autonomy model of political participation: economic independence raises women's capacity and motivation to engage electorally. José Javier Bercoff Osvaldo Meloni Gender turnout gap, Women´s earnings, Compulsory voting, Argentina 2026-09 Social Sorting and Political Cleavages: Evidence from 2.5 Million Electoral Candidates https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pen:papers:26-017&r=&r=pol 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. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde Carlos Sanz Names; Political selection; Social sorting; Political cleavages; Party candidates;Machine learning prediction 2026-09-20 Housing Wealth Accumulation and Electoral Representation https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35731&r=&r=pol Political representation is systematically aligned with economically consequential differences in individual behavior: homeowners who are most deeply incorporated into electoral institutions are systematically more effective at accumulating housing wealth. Using a nationwide voter-property dataset, we find that realized housing appreciation increases monotonically with electoral participation, robust to controls for geography, partisanship, demographics, wealth proxies, and income. Politically engaged homeowners actively generate value by purchasing undervalued properties, investing more in improvements, and selling at a premium, indicating individual-level differences rather than passive market exposure. An original survey shows that these homeowners also systematically differ in personality traits, pointing to deeper individual differences associated with both political engagement and housing-market performance. Carlos Fernando Avenancio-León Yutao He Michael Reher 2026-09 The Political Economy of Tax Expenditures: Fragmentation versus Volume https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:urb:wpaper:26_02&r=&r=pol Tax expenditures are delivered through many legally distinct provisions rather than through a few salient programs. We argue that the number of provisions, not the aggregate revenue foregone, is the margin on which their political economy operates. We develop a three-agent model in which a rent-seeking firm lobbies for tax expenditures, a vote-maximizing politician chooses visible public goods, the volume of tax expenditures and the number of provisions through which they are delivered, and a Treasury official with an institutional preference for budget transparency can expose their hidden cost at the risk of political retaliation. Fiscal illusion is micro-founded as an increasing, concave function of the number of provisions, so that fragmentation is the channel through which opacity is produced. In the subgameperfect equilibrium, a stronger Treasury enforces more, and stronger enforcement reduces both the volume and the fragmentation of tax expenditures while leaving visible public goods essentially unchanged. The number of provisions has no source of variation independent of the opacity mechanism, whereas revenue foregone also reflects legitimate redistributive demand: the count of provisions is therefore a structurally cleaner signal of political capture than the aggregate fiscal magnitude, and institutional quality should discipline fragmentation more robustly than volume. The model yields three testable hypotheses for cross-country data in which provisions are counted separately from revenue foregone. Mauro Marè Francesco Porcelli Francesco Vidoli Tax Expenditures, Fragmentation, Fiscal Illusion, Lobbying, Budget Institutions 2026 On accessibility of the core in mutidimensional spatial majority voting situations https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.10029&r=&r=pol In this paper we consider situations of (multidimensional) spatial majority voting. We analyze such situations having an even number (greater than or equal to 4) of voters and assume that each voter's preference over the set of policies is ``Euclidean": i.e., each voter has a most preferred ``ideal" policy and the voter's pay-offs from policies decrease as the (Euclidean) distance of the policies from the ideal policy goes up. We confine attention to voting situations for which the core has a single element belonging to the interior of the policy set. It is known that under conditions usual in this literature, this element of the core, generally, is not a Condorcet winner: i.e., there is at least one policy outside the core such that the core-policy cannot be reached from it by just one round of majority domination. We demonstrate that, however, under such conditions, starting from any policy in place, by a finite sequence of majority-dominations (we assume, implicitly, sincere voting) the policy in the core is reached eventually. Anindya Bhattacharya Francesco Ciardiello 2026-09 The Trump tariffs: an unpleasant political economy rationale https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:new:wpaper:2610&r=&r=pol According to Blecker (2027), while tariffs per se are not always and everywhere unwarranted (Blecker, 2026), the Trump tariffs will fail on their own terms. Making this argument necessitates suspending disbelief, so as to interpret the Trump tariffs as economic policy -- something that various commentators, who regard the tariffs as no more than political theatre, refuse to indulge. The argument here is that distinguishing between political chicanery and economics in this fashion involves a false dichotomy. Acknowledging the potential relationship between the two permits analysis that points towards an unpleasant political economy rationale for the Trump tariffs. Mark Setterfield Trump tariffs, Authoritarian Neoliberalism, social structure of accumulation, capital-citizen accord 2026-09 “TikTok refugees”: Motivations and political correlates of international platform migration https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:ra6d8_v1&r=&r=pol This study investigates the motivations and political correlates of large-scale platform migration in a transnational context. While prior research has emphasized social and technological drivers, the political significance of migration remains underexplored. Building on theories of alternative political expression, political and media trust, and political efficacy, this study conceptualizes platform migration as an alternative political expression. Using an online survey of a group of users with sustained adoption of RedNote, we analyze the case of “TikTok refugees, ” examining five motivational mechanisms – social influence, platform-use orientation, political expression, cultural openness, and collective identity frames – and a series of political characteristics with migration. The results show that lower political and media trust, lower external efficacy, and higher internal efficacy are significantly associated with affective and perceptual dimensions of migration. In addition, political expression and cultural openness emerge as the strongest motivators, while well-recognized motivations of social influence and platform-use orientation do not show statistically significant correlation. Taken together, the findings highlight platform migration as a complex, multidimensional behavior situated at the intersection of technological change and (geo)political dynamics. Fan, Yibin Wang, Hai 2026-07-13 Women's political representation and fertility: Evidence from gender quotas in Sub-Saharan Africa https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:rwirep:343542&r=&r=pol We study how women's political representation affects fertility in sub-Saharan Africa. Leveraging the staggered adoption of reserved-seat gender quotas across the region and a heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences estimator, we find that quotas increased women's parliamentary representation by 13.3 percentage points and reduced the total fertility rate by 0.23 births per woman. The effect follows a policy-to-behavior pathway: resources shift toward family planning and reproductive health, contraceptive use increases, and unmet need declines; individual-level data further show delayed marriage and later first births. Women's political representation thus translates into greater policy emphasis on reproductive health, illustrating how legislative representation shapes policy outcomes. Pechar, Stefanie Hartwig, Renate Priebe, Jan Family Planning, Female Political Representation, Fertility, Gender Quotas, Reserved Seats, Sub-Saharan Africa 2026 I'll Be There for You: Disaster Relief and Trust in Supranational Institutions https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1231&r=&r=pol Declining trust in supranational institutions may undermine the effective management of global challenges requiring cross-border coordination. We estimate the causal effect of supranational financial assistance following major adverse shocks on citizens' trust in supranational institutions. Our empirical setting is the European Union (EU), where the European Union Solidarity Fund (EUSF) - the EU's main instrument for post-disaster support - provides a uniquely suitable empirical setting for identifying the political effects of supranational assistance following major natural disasters. Identification relies on plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to EUSF assistance together with the "impressionable years" hypothesis. Combining individual-level survey data with geocoded information on natural disasters and EUSF interventions over the 2002-2018 period, we find that exposure to EUSF assistance generates a sizable increase in confidence in the EU that remains detectable several years after the intervention. The effect is economically meaningful and substantially stronger in regions characterized by lower-quality local governance and among more risk-averse individuals, consistent with institutional substitution and insurance mechanisms. Finally, using regional macroeconomic data, we provide supporting evidence that EUSF interventions mitigate the economic downturns associated with natural disasters, suggesting that supranational assistance in moments of distress can generate both economic and political returns. Guglielmo Barone Giulia Romani 2026-09 In bed with the banks? Organised capitalism, institutional bricoleurs, and the role of agency in German financial market reform https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:141035&r=&r=pol Germany is often portrayed as a country where consensus-oriented governance and close industrial coordination favour incremental policy reform. This article applies an agency lens to argue that organised capitalism provides more room for radical institutional change than is commonly acknowledged. I show how self-interested policymakers can mobilise the political and economic ties embodied in the network of organised capitalism in pursuit of their own electoral agendas to implement radical policy change. The argument is illustrated in a case of sweeping financial market reform in 1999, when the Schröder government unexpectedly repealed a tax that long represented the most significant obstacle to financial liberalisation. Media analysis and semi-structured elite interviews suggest that Schröder offered the tax reform as part of a quid pro quo with large commercial banks in a bid for his own political survival. Until then, reform efforts had been stalled over concerns of hostile takeovers and exuberant shareholder dominance. An agency lens nuances our understanding of organised capitalism (1) as a structural constraint that can drag and delay policy change for years, but also (2) as a source of political capital that entrepreneurial policymakers can mobilise to trigger far-reaching reforms. Voss, Dustin financialisation;interest groups;political agency;cross-shareholdings;capital gains tax 2026-09-16 Keeping Climate Populism in Check: A New Perspective on Public Acceptability of Net-Zero Policies https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdp:dpaper:0109&r=&r=pol How damages, economic impacts and policy responses jointly shape the politics of climate change remains poorly understood. In this article, we synthesise the recent wealth of empirical contributions on political outcomes from damages and mitigation policy with a focus on populism. We present a framework connecting climate policies and climate-induced extreme weather events to populist demand, addressing how the rise of populism shapes feasibility of climate policies. The framework comprises income effects, changes in the physical and social environment, behavioural restrictions and symbolic motives induced by climate damages and mitigation measures. We argue that how these elements translate into populist demand depends on both policy design – such as compensation and policy sequencing – and institutional context – such as media framing, procedural inclusion, crisis management and political competition. Climate policies and broader communication on net-zero goals should be designed to prevent climate damages and policy from becoming drivers of populism. Till Armbruster Elina Dilger Théo Konc Linus Mattauch 2026-09-16 Adapting Pairs Trading to Gambling Markets A Case Study of the U.S. Presidential Election https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.22639&r=&r=pol Pairs trading exploits mean reversion in the relationship between related assets. We adapt this idea to political betting markets by modelling the combined implied probability of the two major-party nominees with a latent Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process whose mean-reversion level varies over time and whose observations contain additive noise. Model parameters are estimated from regularly sampled odds data using a state-space likelihood, with consecutive repeated values represented by a single retained observation and the elapsed number of sampling intervals preserved in the continuous-time transition. Parametric-bootstrap upper prediction bounds identify signal times at which the combined implied probability is likely to decline, and a no-intercept Bradley-Terry-type model selects the candidate-specific odds quote. The candidate-selection model is trained on 2020 U.S. presidential-election data and evaluated out of sample on 2024 data. The 2024 analysis produced 130 signals, empirical one-step coverage of 95.1%, a mean synthetic odds-price return of 1.86%, and an unannualized per-trade Sharpe-type ratio of 1.12. These returns are frictionless descriptive quantities rather than executable betting-exchange profits. The results support the integrated framework as a proof of concept for two-candidate electoral markets. Haoyu Liu Len Thomas Benjamin Baer Carl Donovan 2026-09