Previous research has established that good-looking political candidates win more votes. We extend this line of research by examining differences between parties on the left and on the right of the political spectrum. Our study combines data on personal votes in real elections with a web survey...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on who wants to be a politician. We take advantage of a considerable 35 percent salary increase of Finnish MPs in the year 2000, intended to make the pay for parliamentarians more competitive. A difference-indifferences analysis, using...

This paper analyzes educational choices and political support for subsidies to higher education in the presence of a time-consistency problem in income redistribution. There may be political support for so generous subsidization that it motivates the median voter to obtain higher education. As a...

We study the role of beauty in politics. For the first time, focus is put on differences in how women and men evaluate female and male candidates and how different candidate traits relate to success in real and hypothetical elections. We have collected 16,218 assessments by 2,772 respondents of...

We argue that anti-corruption laws may provide an efficiency rationale for why political parties should meddle in the distribution of political nominations and government contracts. Anti-corruption laws forbid trade in spoils that politicians distribute. However, citizens may pay for gaining...

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...

To study whether current spending levels and public knowledge of them contribute to transatlantic differences in policy preferences, we implement parallel survey experiments in Germany and the United States. In both countries, support for increased education spending and teacher salaries falls...

Do differences in citizens' policy preferences hamper international cooperation in education policy? To gain comparative evidence on public preferences for education spending, we conduct representative experiments with information treatments in Switzerland using identical survey techniques...

We estimate the effect of getting elected on future income development of political candidates. We present a bootstrap approach for measuring electoral closeness, which can be used to implement a regression discontinuity design in any electoral system. We apply the method to the Finnish...

The electorates' lack of information about the extent of public spending may cause misalignments between voters' preferences and the size of government. We devise a series of representative survey experiments in Germany that randomly provide treatment groups with information on current spending...