Far-right and far-left parties by definition occupy the fringes of politics, with policy proposals outside the mainstream. This paper asks how public attitudes about such policies respond once an extreme party increases their political representation at the local level. We study attitudes...

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...

How important are political parties in motivating and disciplining elected officials? Using a difference-in-discontinuity design, we study how shocks to incumbents’ re-election probabilities affect legislative behavior in a setting where parties fully control candidate selection. We find that...

This paper exploits a novel trial in Norwegian local elections in 2011 to provide empirical evidence on fiscal performance from lowering the minimum voting age from 18 to 16. Using a difference in differences research strategy, we find that this voting age change reduced the net operating...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters’ preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates’ policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...

Is politics a lucrative business? The question is approached in this paper, as one of few to quantify the monetary returns to holding political office in a typical developed democracy where parties are the main political actors. By applying a difference-in-difference setting with a carefully...

We document a remarkable increase over the past two and a half decades in the fraction of people in England feeling close to no party – the rise of the “no party” – which, today, is close to constituting an absolute majority. We develop a new method to distinguish between age, period,...

Does party competition affect political activism? This paper studies the decision of party supporters to join political campaigns. We present a framework that incorporates supporters' instrumental and expressive motives and illustrates that party competition can either increase or decrease party...

The effective number of political parties (ENP) in a single member plurality rule electoral system is analyzed as a dynamic process whereby the tournament nature of the election contest induces excessive entry and sunk entry costs promote persistence even as Duverger-Demsetz type political...

This paper develops a theoretical framework that makes predictions on (a) the conditions under which a populist party decides to run and the policy position it takes and (b) voters’ response under different electoral systems. We test these predictions using data on Italian municipal elections...