We leverage on important findings in social psychology to build a behavioral theory of protest vote. An individual develops a feeling of resentment if she loses income over time while richer people do not, or if she does not gain as others do, i.e. when her relative deprivation increases. In...

We analyze how the introduction of the voting advice application (VAA) smartvote affects voter turnout, voting behavior and electoral outcomes. The Swiss context offers an ideal setting to identify the causal effects of online information with aggregate real world data because smartvote was...

We introduce a new dataset that includes quantitative harmonized indices of tax reforms based on qualitative information of about 900 Economic Surveys from the OECD and 37,000 tax-related news from the IBFD archives. The data set provides indicators on tax reforms for tax rates and tax bases,...

Emigrants are less likely to participate in elections in their home country. They are also self-selected in terms of education, gender, age, and political preferences, changing the structure of the origin population. High emigration rates can therefore have a systematic influence on election...

Voters often express support for a candidate whose policy platforms differ from their ideal policy preferences. We argue that under these circumstance acts of expressing support can causally change voters’ policy preferences. We conceptualize our arguments in a theoretical model of policy...

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...

Using estimates of support for Leave across UK local authority areas constructed from a comprehensive 20,000 strong survey, we show that both the level and the geographic variation capturing differential degrees of support for Leave have changed significantly since the 2016 EU referendum. A lot...

Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? We leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative...

Using data of Swiss referenda from 1981 to 1999, this paper presents new empirical results which allow us to discriminate better between the decision and mobilisation hypotheses of electoral participation. First, theoretical considerations which lead to these hypotheses are presented as well as...

We ask three questions. First, do election systems differ in how they translate physical attractiveness of candidates into electoral success? Second, do political parties strategically exploit the "beauty premium" when deciding on which candidates to nominate, and, third, do elected MPs use...