We investigate the effect of elections on underreporting COVID-19 mortality, measured as the difference between excess mortality and official statistics. Our identification strategy takes advantage of a natural experiment of the unanticipated onset of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and the...

This report offers an analysis of Russia's Africa policy since its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Three major conclusions emerge from it. First, Russia is engaged in a concerted effort to maintain and, if possible, extend its politico-military influence on the continent. To this end, it...

Though governments regularly implement fiscal adjustments to avert crisis, voter attitudes towards competing adjustment strategies are still poorly understood. A conjoint experiment with 8,000 survey respondents in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru confirms that individuals prefer spending-...

There is a concern that citizens with different political positions and party affiliations increasingly dislike each other. We examine this affective polarization (AP), which is often associated with a weakening of democracy, in the context of Switzerland's multiparty landscape with proportional...