This paper studies how political competition can lead candidates to strategically increase the salience of specific issues, in order to influence voting decisions of marginal groups, with non trivial consequences for turnout rates. In my setup issues differ in their divisiveness, to be defined...

Recent contributions to the political economics literature (Trebbi et al. 2007; Aghion et al. 2004) have challenged the view that political institutions are exogenous to the behaviour of agents in the political arena. We explicitly address the potential endogeneity of institutions by examining the...

The ability of voters to use the available electoral instruments is crucial for the functioning of democracies. The paper shows that voters consider the institutional environment when making electoral decisions. Voters recognize that executives who face binding term limits (i.e., lame ducks)...

One of the most widely discussed phenomena in American politics today is the perceived increasing partisan divide that splits the U.S. electorate. A central contested question is whether this diagnosis is actually true, and if so, what is the underlying cause. We develop a model that relates the...

US voters have been moving apart in the last twenty years. This paper analyzes how their voting participation has partitioned by looking at US counties in the 2012 Presidential elections. To tackle this question, we propose a methodology that jointly addresses spatial autocorrelation of the...

We assess the influence of moneyed interests on legislative decisions. Our theory predicts that the vote outcome distribution and donation flows in a legislature feature a discontinuity at the approval threshold of bills if special interest groups are involved in vote buying. Testing the...

This paper establishes the presence of a substantial gender gap in the relationship between state legislature service and the subsequent pursuit of a Congressional career. The empirical approach uses a sample of mixed-gender elections to compare the differential political career progression of...

This paper examines the impact of terrorism on voting behavior in the United States. We rely on an exhaustive list of terror attacks over the period 1970-2016 and exploit the inherent randomness of the success or failure of terror attacks to identify the political impacts of terrorism. We first...

What is the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 U.S. presidential election? Guided by a pre-analysis plan, we estimate the effect of COVID-19 cases and deaths on the change in county-level voting for Donald Trump between 2016 and 2020. To account for potential confounders, we include a...

This paper develops a recursive model of voter turnout and voting outcomes at U.S. county level to investigate the socioeconomic determinants of recent U.S. presidential elections. It is shown that the relationship between many socioeconomic variables and voting outcomes is not uniform across...