Which actions by governments stoke or pacify an insurgency? Scholarly research on the topic has often been relegated to the study of this question at the country level, comparing across large units and rarely looking inside the state. Our research focuses on the primary actors in a contest for...

Does economic inequality diminish the capacity of democracies to extract voluntary sacrifice? And does inequality undermine citizen's willingness to do their civic duty when the state is under threat? We address these questions by linking income inequality with people's willingness to fight for...

This paper estimates how campaign expenditures, candidate incumbency, and voter registration distributions determine U.S. House of Representative vote shares using congressional election data. We quantify the magnitude of these factors using a voter discrete choice demand model similar to Berry,...

This paper uses a new database on campaign funding on French members of parliament to analyze their efficiency. The database includes the level of funding, as well as the origin of the resources the politicians have at their disposal. The funding sources are identified with true resources used...

In French national elections, the presence of a national economic vote is clear. However, the character of the economic vote is less clear at the regional level. Assuming regional elections are second order, voters may wish to signal the national incumbent, by rewarding or punishing it for...

Voters often split tickets, voting for candidates from different parties in simultaneous elections. In this paper, I apply a political agency framework with implicit incentives to study ticket splitting in simultaneous municipal and regional elections. I show that ticket splitting is a natural...

This paper utilizes a simple model of redistributive politics with voter abstention to analyze the impact of nonpartisan ‘get-out-the-vote' efforts on policy outcomes. Although such efforts are often promoted on the grounds that they provide the social benefit of increasing participation in...

Recruitment and retention constitute fundamental requirements for any organization. For a rebel group engaged in armed conflict with the state, recruitment and retention of personnel can constitute the difference between life and death for the leadership of such organizations and the...

This study investigates the effect of the imposition of term limits on the number of women elected to state legislatures in the United States. It uses a multivariate regression model, which differs from earlier works by utilizing a pooled, time-series data set of state legislatures, from...

How do elite parties win over poor voters while maintaining their core constituencies? How can religious parties expand their electoral base? This paper argues that social service provision constitutes an important electoral strategy for elite-backed religious parties to succeed in developing...