In their pursuit of being elected, politicians might not provide their constituents with independent viewpoints, but …, "candor", can be sustained as equilibria. This means that the public's trust or distrust in politicians may be self …-fulfilling prophecies. Importantly, the more informed politicians are about public opinion, the more likely it is that populist behavior can …

́electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal state of Hesse. The … experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral threshold (the so called "five percent hurdle") for local elections in … elections, but local politicians from large mainstream parties had the ability to adjust municipal political institutions in …