Research on distributive politics overwhelmingly examines actors who control the state apparatus: geographically targeted spending by central governments, and intergovernmental transfers allocated according to political alignment. Far less is known about how opposition parties governing at the subnational level allocate their own resources. I study Istanbul, where the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) won the mayoralty in 2019 after twenty-five years of Justice and Development Party (AKP) dominance and expanded the municipality’s means-tested cash assistance program, the Social Support Istanbulkart, from roughly 176,000 to 224,000 recipient households. Using neighborhood-level data on aid distribution, electoral outcomes, and socioeconomic indicators, I find that allocation follows an inverted U in CHP vote share, peaking in electorally marginal neighborhoods and declining in both parties’ strongholds. The pattern replicates within a contiguous border-pair design and is strongest where need-based explanations are weakest. The targeting was followed by modest gains: a one-standard-deviation rise in aid recipients per resident is associated with a 0.36 percentage-point increase in opposition vote share in the 2023 presidential election, in a city whose annulled 2019 mayoral race was decided by a quarter of a percentage point. Electoral logic in distributive allocation is thus not confined to national incumbents: an opposition party that lacks the machinery of contingent exchange can pursue it instead through the geographic calibration of a programmatic instrument.
The relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and redistributive preferences remains a contested issue at both the theoretical and empirical levels. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the causal effect of immigration from culturally distant origin countries on the native population’s preferences for redistribution, employing a difference-in-differences identification strategy. We exploit the European refugee crisis of 2015–2016 as a natural experiment, leveraging cross-regional variation in asylum seeker inflows to identify whether exposure to large-scale forced migration attenuated native support for redistributive policies. Under the Progressive’s Dilemma hypothesis, one would expect a significant erosion of redistributive preferences in regions experiencing pronounced migration inflows. Our estimates, however, provide no support for this prediction: the estimated coefficients are either statistically indistinguishable from zero or marginally positive. These findings are robust across a range of alternative specifications. Taken together, our results challenge the Progressive’s Dilemma hypothesis and suggest that ethnic homogeneity does not constitute a necessary precondition for the sustainability of European-style welfare state arrangements.
We examine whether identity-based voting is stronger in socially closed communities. Using municipality-level returns from Italian national elections between 2001 and 2022, we proxy long-run social closure with the share of the most common surname. Higher surname concentration is associated with stronger support for the League after conditioning on municipal characteristics and province fixed effects. The relationship is concentrated in northern Italy and does not extend to Fratelli d’Italia or Alleanza Nazionale. It remains after accounting for civic capital and gender norms, although the data do not identify a unique mechanism. Instrumental-variable estimates based on terrain ruggedness provide complementary, cautiously interpreted evidence.
While differences in how men and women speak in parliament are well established, we still lack evidence encompassing a longer time span. Using Finnish parliamentary speech data from 1948 to 2018—a period spanning from token female presence to near-parity—we find that while women have always spoken differently than men, the differences widen as women’s share of seats surpasses roughly 10–20% in the 1960s. Crucially, women already serving in parliament at that point also shift toward topics more closely aligned with “women’s issues”, suggesting the change reflects a collective contextual shift rather than the arrival of new cohorts. Moreover, tenure length is not correlated with how women speak, further indicating that changes in women’s behavior relate more to contextual factors than to individual career trajectories.
The academic debate on whether economic sanctions stabilize or destabilize target governments has produced mixed findings. This paper argues that the relationship between sanctions and domestic conflict depends on pre-existing governance conditions. Using a global panel of 122 countries spanning 1996–2020, we examine whether corruption moderates the relationship between sanctions and violent internal conflict. The results show that trade sanctions are associated with higher conflict deaths in countries with higher prior levels of corruption. The estimated marginal association of trade sanctions becomes positive and statistically significant when the V-Dem Political Corruption Index exceeds approximately 0.6 and increases at higher corruption levels. In low-corruption settings, trade sanctions are associated with lower conflict deaths, consistent with a rally-around-the-flag mechanism. The findings remain robust across alternative outcome transformations, extensive- and intensive-margin analyses, corruption measures, lag specifications, interaction formulations, and sanction-sender definitions. Arms sanctions show a similar positive interaction with corruption, although conflict patterns preceding their imposition warrant greater caution in interpreting these estimates. Evidence for financial sanctions and government-stability outcomes is weaker. Overall, the findings indicate that the association between sanctions and domestic conflict varies with the governance environment of the target country.
This paper investigates how cultural conflicts between migrant officials and host cities affect promotion and marketization in China. Using panel data from 346 cities (2000-2017), we find asymmetric effects: southern officials assigned to northern cities face reduced promotion prospects, whereas northern officials serving in the south experience enhanced career advancement. These conflicts shape marketization outcomes through promotion expectations—optimistic expectations among southbound officials mitigate potential negative effects, while pessimistic expectations among northbound officials offset their otherwise pro-marketization influence. The results underscore the importance of cultural fit in governance and its implications for political incentives and economic development in transitional economies.
This paper examines the political consequences of road infrastructure development in Spain since the country’s transition to democracy. While road construction is often justified on economic grounds—enhancing connectivity, reducing costs, and stimulating growth—it also carries significant political implications. Building on a rich literature on the political determinants and effects of infrastructure spending, we explore how improvements in municipal road connectivity have influenced electoral outcomes in democratic Spain. Using a newly assembled dataset that combines geocoded data on road development from 1983 onward with electoral results, we find that municipalities experiencing improved accessibility during an electoral term exhibit higher voter turnout and increased electoral support for PSOE, the incumbent party during Spain’s democratic consolidation period (1982–1996). The electoral returns to road construction are weaker and less consistent for PP, which held office in the subsequent period (1996–2004), pointing to a partisan asymmetry in the credit-claiming mechanism. These findings suggest that road construction, by improving citizens’ access to labor markets, public services, and economic opportunities, generates material welfare gains that translate into retrospective electoral rewards. However, the political beneficiary depends on the partisan and historical context of the investment. Our results are robust to strategies addressing potential endogeneity in infrastructure placement.
I discuss politically optimal restrictions on citizen movement in a pandemic. To find the political equilibrium, a standard voter preference framework is extended with features of a society where citizens make choices under pandemic conditions. Specifically, their vaccine choice is endogenous and they are vaccine-hesitant, they do not readily comply with restrictions, lockdowns tax their available time for work and leisure, and access to vaccines is unequal. Citizens also vote for their preferred level of restrictions. In a median-voter equilibrium the majority will choose zero restrictions, unless the government offers some positive income support, or a subsidy, which depends on the severity of restrictions. Voters will tolerate stricter restrictions when the subsidy grows. The minimum subsidy and additional conditions for the existence of majority support for non-zero restrictions are discussed. Large-scale evidence using Google’s citizen mobility data from the COVID-19 pandemic supports the theory. A set of policy implications completes the analysis, which could help governments build political support for their planned containment measures in future pandemics.
This paper investigates whether financial development is associated with 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 may alter the composition of pro-redistribution coalitions even when average preferences remain stable.
This paper examines the political consequences of climate activism during the ongoing global energy transition. We exploit the quasi-experimental setup offered by the Stop-Adani convoy, a multi-week environmental protest that traversed Australia’s eastern states in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election, in opposition to the proposed development of a large coal mine. Our findings show that exposure to the convoy increased the (more conservative) Coalition’s vote share while reducing support for the (environmentalist) Greens party. These effects are concentrated in areas with high dependence on mining employment, particularly in Queensland and other mining-intensive regions. Our results demonstrate that environmental activism can trigger significant political backlash, localised precisely where the perceived material costs of the green transition are most concentrated.
In ageing societies, the growing number of elderly citizens is expected to bias the allocation of public resources in their favour, as office-seeking politicians respond to electoral incentives. Yet, such a tendency is scarcely observable in the data for some European countries. This paper develops a theoretical model of electoral competition between two parties facing an electorate composed of young and old voters. A key feature of the model is that voters belonging to different generations, despite having conflicting preferences over the provision of public goods, are linked by family ties that generate altruistic preferences and intra-family transfers. We show that party platforms tend to accommodate the preferences of the demographically dominant group. However, this effect weakens as altruism becomes more widespread, offering a mechanism to reconcile the empirical evidence with theoretical expectations.
We build a game-theoretic model to formalize Kindleberger’s (1996) idea of the public good of leadership. Two superpowers use ideology to compete for influence by forming clubs whose members benefit more when their orientations are closer to the club’s. Pecuniary externalities create complementarity among non-superpowers. Their collective agency forces superpower to compromise by choosing an orientation not aligned with its own. We find that superpowers compromise most when expanding their clubs but less as members become more dependent on them. Moreover, increased member endowments do not always enlarge the club; disproportionate growth by a few can instead contract it.
We present a model of national security in which an authoritarian government is engaged in a war with an insurgency. The population comprises a rich majority and a poor minority. Members of each group may participate in an insurgency and receive a payoff, which is private information. The government receives imperfect signals about whether or not a citizen is an insurgent. In this context, we find that in equilibrium, faulty intelligence and inequality may endogenously result in discrimination that targets the minority disproportionately, even without inherent biases. Further, a rise in inequality and greater aversion to human rights violations may actually worsen this asymmetry. We also find that the size of the insurgency and the probability of regime change have a non-monotonic relationship with the level of inequality, resulting in an inverted U-curve. Finally, we find that human rights violations first increase and then decrease with inequality, also yielding an inverted U-curve.
This paper investigates how raising awareness of public debt sustainability affects attitudes and policy preferences. In a survey experiment, we randomly assign an information treatment about government debt to a representative sample of the Italian population. Although the treatment makes respondents more sensitive to debt-related risks, the perceived urgency of debt reduction does not increase. Moreover, while remaining averse to taxes, respondents become more supportive of spending cuts. Our evidence that individuals with biased prior beliefs are not more responsive to the treatment highlights the behavioral challenges of building political support for debt-stabilizing policies by providing relevant and objective information.
This paper investigates whether and how office-holding politicians strategically time salient legislative decisions to periods of higher or lower media attention, and how such strategies depend on electoral incentives. I analyze confidence votes in Italy (2011–2022), exploiting the institutional rule that allows governments to link the approval of a bill to a confidence vote. Comparing partisan and “technical” governments, I find that partisan cabinets are 3–4 pp. less likely to schedule votes before predictable news events, whereas this effect is absent for technical governments led by non-partisan prime ministers. The pattern is robust across alternative event sets and time windows, and is absent around unpredictable news shocks (natural disasters) and ordinary parliamentary sittings. Moreover, the effect is stronger for narrow-majority governments, and economic legislation. Taken together, the evidence indicates that partisan cabinets strategically time confidence votes to avoid competing with major news, consistent with an accountability- and coalition-signaling motive.
This paper analyzes the optimal supermajority threshold for approving fiscal rule suspensions within a two-period political turnover model. Faced with the potential loss of power, the incumbent party aims to secure preferred expenditures by increasing public debt. To counteract this, an expenditure rule requiring legislative approval for suspension is introduced. The analysis shows that the voting threshold in parliament should exceed a simple majority, making a simple majority rule suboptimal. A stricter supermajority is necessary when fiscal expenditure rules are more flexible, as it allows for more effective responses to economic fluctuations. Moreover, while higher initial debt levels call for stricter expenditure rules, the optimal supermajority threshold remains unaffected by the debt level. Finally, as political polarization among voters intensifies, the optimal threshold decreases, increasingly aligning with the incumbent party’s preferences.
Due to technological innovation, political interest groups sending messages via news platforms have the ability to (i) microtarget news based on individual-level voter data and (ii) obfuscate their identities, which can be exploited to spread disinformation. We experimentally study the implementation of two proposed interventions in the laboratory, aiming to prevent election manipulation by disinformation in various media environments. We find that mandatory disclosure of interests, with or without a microtargeting ban, increases the efficiency of aggregate voter decision-making. However, only the combination of disclosure of interests and a microtargeting ban mitigates sender influence in this stylized voting environment. The implementation of a microtargeting ban without disclosure requirements has adverse effects.
