Positive Political Economics http://lists.repec.org/mailman/listinfo/nep-pol Positive Political Economics 2026-06-15 Population Aging and the Rise of Populism in Europe https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1761&r=&r=pol This paper identifies population aging as an important driver of populism using multilevel regression analysis on individuals from European countries between 2002 and 2019. Unlike individual aging, we focus on population- level demographic change measured by the old-age dependency ratio (OADR), i.e., the ratio of people aged 65 and over to those of working age. which captures the structural balance between older and economically active populations. Using data from nine rounds of the European Social Survey, we examine the relationship between population aging and populist attitudes, captured through voting for populist parties, political trust, and immigration attitudes. Our findings suggest that population aging is associated with declining electoral turnout, higher support for populist parties, lower trust in political institutions, and increased anti-immigrant sentiment. These effects appear across both younger and older voters, indicating that aging societies influence political preferences beyond individual aging. They may operate through mechanisms such as economic insecurity, cultural backlash, or shifts in collective societal priorities. Gavresi, Despina Irmen, Andreas Litina, Anastasia Aging, Populism, Trust, Immigrant Attitudes 2026 Information and voting: Evidence from Peru's 2026 presidential election https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2606.01687&r=&r=pol We study how election-night flash estimates shape voting in Peru's fragmented 2026 presidential election. We exploit a natural experiment: on April 12, 2026, 187 polling tables across 13 voting centers failed to install, and the \emph{Jurado Nacional de Elecciones} (JNE) extended voting for the affected $\approx\!55 000$ electors to Monday, April 13. These voters cast ballots after observing the Ipsos and Datum flash estimates; otherwise comparable Sunday voters did not. A Bayesian-updating model of multi-candidate plurality voting frames the analysis, yielding predictions about vote reallocation toward the three candidates the estimates rendered viable -- L\'opez Aliaga, S\'anchez, and Nieto. We estimate treatment effects on candidate vote shares at both the \emph{acta} level and the acta-weighted polling-station level, comparing treated and control \emph{locales de votaci\'on} matched on pre-treatment covariates. How flash estimates reshape voting is of first-order importance for Peru, given its institutional instability and high political volatility over the past decade. Marcelo Gallardo Nicolas Velarde Cristina Gutarra 2026-06 Elections and Water Pollution Cleanup in the Ganges River in India https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:128634&r=&r=pol We analyze the role of regular elections in ensuring water pollution cleanup in the Ganges river in a north Indian city. Our central result is that, in the absence of elections, politicians have no incentive to undertake pollution cleanup, leading to poor environmental outcomes. In contrast, when elections are present, retrospective voting by a representative voter, who re-elects incumbents only if observed cleanup exceeds a threshold, can effectively discipline politicians. We show that this threshold strategy induces politicians to choose positive levels of pollution abatement in equilibrium. By explicitly characterizing the optimization problems of the politician, the voter, and the resulting equilibrium, we demonstrate that electoral accountability can serve as a powerful mechanism for improving water quality in the Ganges. Our findings highlight the critical role of democratic institutions in mitigating environmental externalities in developing country contexts. Batabyal, Amitrajeet Yoo, Seung Jick Election, Ganges River, Pollution Cleanup, Retrospective Voting 2026-01-17 Green Mandates and the Politics in the Jungle: Do Leftist Mayors Curb Amazon Deforestation? https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18659&r=&r=pol This paper investigates whether left-leaning politicians are more effective than their right-leaning counterparts in reducing deforestation in the Legal Amazon in Brazil. Using data from 760 Amazon municipalities and a regression discontinuity approach based on close elections, it finds that leftist mayors tend to increase environmental spending always and may reduce deforestation, though the latter effect are uneven and do not extend to reforestation outcomes. Their impact is stronger in contexts with fewer coalition constraints, greater fiscal autonomy, and certain geographic or political conditions. While electoral dynamics often bring environmentally focused candidates to power in high-risk areas, structural and economic pressures limit mayoral ability to achieve sustained reductions in forest loss. Overall, the findings highlight both the potential and the constraints of decentralised governance in advancing environmental protection and carry implications for subnational environmental policy not only in Brazil, but also beyond its border. Nishijima, Marislei Pal, Sarmistha political ideology, leftist mayors, deforestation, reforestation, close elections, regression discontinuity design, local democracy, Brazil 2026-05 The Civil War Reduced Slave Owners’ Economic Power but Increased Their Political Influence https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18650&r=&r=pol Did Southern elites’ economic losses from abolition translate into diminished political influence? Using novel census-linked data on state lawmakers across four slave-owning and two Northern states (1850–1880), we document a striking paradox: despite the massive wealth shock of emancipation, the political influence of former slave owners increased during Reconstruction and its aftermath. We show that former slave owners won office at similar rates as in the antebellum period and secured more committee assignments. Comparable patterns are not visible among wealthy legislators in Northern comparison states. This suggests that Southern elites responded to economic loss by tightening their grip on formal political institutions. Our findings point to formal political institutions as one channel through which defeated economic elites preserved influence during Reconstruction and its aftermath. Bellani, Luna Hager, Anselm Maurer, Stephan wealth inequality, elites and development, US South, slavery, political power, reconstruction 2026-05 On the political economy of nonlinear income taxation https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:128974&r=&r=pol The political economy setting of voting over general nonlinear income taxes with labor disincentives and information asymmetry in consumer/worker/voter types is considered. Agents do not communicate or coordinate with each other. The economy is the realization of a finite draw from a continuous distribution. The revenue required from a draw is determined by Pareto optimal provision of a public good for that draw. Assuming that the government must meet the revenue requirement for any possible draw, in other words the tax is robust, a majority rule equilibrium is shown to exist at the median voter's preferred tax function out of this robust set. The key restrictions on utility are additive separability, quasi-linearity, and utility from the public good is multiplicative in type. Berliant, Marcus Gouveia, Miguel Voting; Income taxation; Public good; Robustness 2026-05-03 Intergenerational Mobility and Populist Attitudes in Latin America https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dls:wpaper:0374&r=&r=pol This paper examines the relationship between intergenerational educational mobility and populist attitudes in Latin America, a region characterized by low levels of intergenerational mobility and a long-standing presence of populist leadership. In contexts where social origin strongly predicts individual outcomes, perceptions of unfairness may create fertile ground for populist narratives. Using harmonized microdata from 18 waves of the Latinobarómetro survey covering individuals born between 1940 and 2000, we document a robust negative association between intergenerational mobility and populist attitudes across multiple indicators, including anti-democratic attitudes, support for military governments, anti-immigrant sentiments, and institutional distrust. These results hold when using a relative mobility measure that captures pure positional change net of structural trends, and at the cohort level when exploiting standard mobility measures from the literature. Cohort-level estimates further reveal that the effect of persistence is amplified in high-inequality contexts, suggesting that immobility and contemporaneous inequality act as complements in shaping political discontent. Decomposing inequality into opportunity and effort components, we find evidence suggesting that populist attitudes are mostly driven by inequalities of opportunity. These findings suggest that the persistent emergence of populist leadership in Latin America is linked to the region’s stubbornly low intergenerational mobility and unequal access to opportunities. Bautista Santamarina Matías Ciaschi Mariana Marchionni 2026-06 Political Participation Under Uncertain Norms https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:809&r=&r=pol Democracies can sustain disagreement over outcomes, but they are harder to sustain when citizens also perceive the governing norms of political contestation as settled along partisan lines. We study this problem in the context of Brexit and experimentally vary truthful information about how much Leave and Remain supporters agree with, and how uncertain they are about, the appropriateness of a second referendum. We find that uncertainty matters more than agreement: respondents become more willing to donate to and tweet for campaigns on either side of the referendum question when they learn that others, especially members of their own political camp, are more uncertain about the norm. The pattern is strongest for support for the norm position that is less popular within one's own political camp, while private beliefs about the norm and about Brexit itself barely move. These findings are more consistent with reduced conformity pressure and higher perceived returns to political expression than with private-belief updating, and they suggest that information about uncertainty can generate a meaningful form of depolarization in democratic engagement even when underlying outcome preferences remain largely unchanged. Fetzer, Thiemo Hensel, Lukas Roth, Christopher Zillessen, Hannah Uncertainty, Norms, Social Image, Political Participation JEL Classification: D81, D83 P11 2026 Assessing Foreign Interference During the "Year of Elections" https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:smp69_v1&r=&r=pol How widespread was foreign interference in elections in 2024, the "global year of elections"? We compile new data on foreign election interference in each of the 63 national-level executive and legislative elections held in 2024. We find that foreign interference was common, there is clear evidence of it in 30 percent of elections and affecting 60 percent of the world’s voting population. Russia conducted the most interference efforts, targeting more elections than all other actors combined, and focusing largely on European elections. Interference was most often carried out through social media and by setting up fake news sites. Greene, Kevin T. Imbrogno, Jeffrey J. Shapiro, Jacob N 2026-05-20 From Political Wedges to Debt Accumulation https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129004&r=&r=pol This paper develops a quantitative theory of how political distortions in fiscal policy generate public debt accumulation inside a currency union. The model has two member states that share a common monetary authority. The North government maximises resident welfare. The South government maximises a weighted average of welfare and incumbent vote share, which biases fiscal policy toward targeted transfers and away from broad public goods. The numerical solution closes the fiscal block with a reduced-form stationary debt rule around calibrated debt targets. In the baseline calibration, the political distortion lowers South public goods by about 45% relative to a benevolent South government and implies a consumption-equivalent welfare cost of 3.23% per period. A one-time adverse South political shock raises South debt by 0.56% relative to its steady-state level at peak, equivalent to about 0.68 percentage points of steady-state South output. Eight consecutive adverse political shocks raise South debt by about 4.43% relative to steady-state debt, equivalent to about 5.37 percentage points of steady-state South output. The mechanism is a deterioration in the primary balance caused by politically motivated transfer expansion. This pattern is robust to alternative home bias, vote sensitivity, political transfer elasticity, and debt targets. Additional exercises show that tighter fiscal rules reduce debt volatility but do not remove the underlying distortion, while an endogenous sovereign spread breaks local determinacy under first-order perturbation. Mohades, Siavash Political distortions; fiscal policy; public debt; currency union; targeted transfers; fiscal rules. 2026-05-06 Does Finance Change the Taste for Redistribution? https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fau:wpaper:wp2026_10&r=&r=pol This paper investigates whether financial development shapes people’s preferences for redistribution. Although a large literature examines the effects of finance on growth and inequality, much less is known about its influence on the political demand for redistribution. Using individual-level data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, we estimate the relation between financial development and preferences for income equality. We find no significant average effect of financial development on redistributive demand. However, this aggregate neutrality masks significant individual-level heterogeneity. We find that financial development is associated with lower support for redistribution among men, married individuals, and right-leaning respondents. In contrast, the effect is significantly positive for more educated individuals. These results suggest that financial development reshapes the political landscape not by shifting average preferences, but by altering the composition and polarization of pro-redistribution coalitions. Roman Horvath Matej Korinek Laurent Weill preferences for redistribution, financial development, income inequality 2026-06 Taxing Wealth or Capital Income? The Impact of Political Ideology on Property Tax Policy in Spain: A Quasi-Experimental Study https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ays:ispwps:paper2623&r=&r=pol Although an extensive theoretical literature debates the advantages of taxing wealth stocks versus capital income, the role of partisan effects in shaping these fiscal tools remains under-explored. This study investigates the party control effect on local property taxation in Spain, comparing a recurrent tax on property wealth with a capital gains tax on property transfers, a non-mandatory tax. Employing a regression discontinuity design on close municipal elections from 2011 to 2015, a period marked by the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, we isolate the impact of left-wing government control. We find that left-wing governments increase effective property tax rates roughly twice the average increase under right-wing administrations, an effect substantially amplified in multi-term governments (mayors with previous experience) and unaffected by coalition status. For the capital gains tax, ideology mainly affects the adoption decision: left-wing governments are about 5 percent more likely to implement the tax, and this effect is stronger in less wealthy municipalities. However, once the tax is in place, the partisan effect plays no systematic role in determining the tax rate. Thus, despite a political discourse that does not map neatly onto the wealth-versus-capital-income distinction, actual partisan behaviour aligns broadly with theoretical expectations. The post-crisis context amplified ideological differences in property tax responses. Jose Maria Tubio-Sanchez Santiago Lago-Peñas Xoaquin Fernandez-Leiceaga Maria Cadaval-Sampedro 2026-06 The Moral Question: Norms and Anti-System Politics https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:nwrtz_v1&r=&r=pol Do moral norms influence citizens' tolerance of anti-system behavior by politicians? Although moral norms are often invoked as guardrails, their measurement and causal influence in politics remain understudied. We theorize the link between moral norms, personal judgments, and attitudinal consequences and test our theory in a pre-registered survey experiment with financial incentives. Respondents faced moral trade-offs concerning personal scandals, political violence, corruption, and anti-democratic actions. Using a second-order approach to elicit beliefs about what others consider morally wrong, we find that norms against democratic violations are descriptively weaker than norms against scandal and corruption; both lag behind norms against violence. Causal evidence shows that norms primarily shift judgments when respondents face large discrepancies from their initial perceived norm and have strong conformity motives. However, this largely does not translate into attitudinal shifts. The findings shed light on the concept of moral norms and detail their consequences and limitations for politics. Goldstein, Daniel A. N. Wig, Tore 2026-06-03 Hansard DB: A Relational Database of Australian Parliamentary Speech https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ajr:sodwps:paper_1779665234420_559&r=&r=pol Legislative chambers are central institutions of democratic governance, where representatives debate policy, justify decisions, and are held accountable. In Australia, the principal record of what is said and done in parliament is the official parliamentary transcript, commonly known in Westminster systems as Hansard. Yet while these records are publicly accessible, they are difficult to use at scale because they are not readily queryable, computationally integrated, or suitable for systematic longitudinal analysis. This paper addresses that problem by introducing Hansard DB, a relational database of Australian federal parliamentary speech spanning Federation to the present. Hansard DB integrates speeches, questions, answers, and interjections with parliamentarian metadata from the Parliamentary Handbook. Built through a multi-stage parsing and validation pipeline, the database supports flexible querying across text and metadata for large-scale and longitudinal analysis. The paper also discusses the epistemic limitations of Hansard research. The official transcripts are edited and incomplete records of political speech, shaped by institutional rules, editorial practices, and omissions of tone, gesture, and context. Hansard DB therefore contributes not only a usable database, but also guidance for interpreting parliamentary transcripts acconting for these limitations. Alfie Chadwick Simon D. Angus Libby Lester text-as-data, natural language processing, political speech 2026-05-22