This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between the occupation of candidates running in parliamentary elections and their electoral success. To identify local-level variation in urbanization, we leverage exogenous changes to the boundaries of electoral constituencies in the...

Motivated by insufficient fiscal discipline in democracy, we introduce and examine “Catenarian Discipline Rules”. An office-holder decides in each period whether to use available resources for his/her own personal consumption or for providing public goods for the population. In the unique...

We argue that standard models of voting do a bad job explaining the frequency of very close mass elections with high turnout. We instead model head-to-head elections as a competition between incentive schemes to turn out voters and elucidate conditions under which parties might prefer close...

We study how antipersonnel landmines thwart democratic accountability and the consolidation of post-conflict democratic institutions. We do so by exploiting the randomness in the timing of landmine explosions relative to election days, comparing the electoral outcomes of voting polls located...

This paper revisits the conventional but unproven wisdom that voters penalize governments for adopting fiscal austerity in a sample of advanced economies. We consider the composition of the austerity package and the economic manifesto of the implementing government and find that austerity...

We study the impact of web search personalization on ideological segregation in search results. We deploy 150 synthetic internet users with randomized partisan preferences across 25 US cities. These users generate authentic browsing histories and are active during the US 2020 election and its...