Recent increases in political polarization in social media raise questions about the relationship between negative online messages and the decline in political trust around the world. To evaluate this claim causally, we implement a variant of the well-known trust game in a survey experiment with...

We study vote trading among U.S. Congress members. By tracking roll-call votes within bills across five legislatures and politicians' personal connections made during the school years, we document a propensity of connected legislators to vote together that depends on how salient the bill is to...

When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be influenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’ policies – i.e., policies to the...

There is a growing literature on the phenomenon of dynasties in democracies, with most studies indicating a causal effect of incumbency on dynasty formation under candidate-centered electoral systems. In this study, we explore the relationship between the incumbency advantage and dynasties in...

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness....

We investigate whether politicians award intergovernmental grants to core supporters. Our new dataset contains information on discretionary project grants from a German state government to municipalities over the period 2008-2011. The results show that discretionary grants were awarded to...

Female under-representation in politics can be the result of parties' selection of candidates and/or of voters' electoral preferences. To assess the impact of these two channels, we exploit the introduction of Italian Law 215/2013, which prescribes both gender quotas on candidate lists and...

This paper studies the relationship between incumbents' performance and political polarization, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a spatial model of political competition in which the voters use the incumbent's performance in office to update their beliefs about his competence. A...

This paper examines the incentives for a party leader in office and for a parties' rank-and-file to replace a sitting member of parliament. As to the leader's decision, we show that the leader prefers to replace a critical member of parliament who votes against the leader's policy. A competent...

We study how friendship shapes students' political opinions in a natural experiment. We use the indicator whether two students were exogenously assigned to a short-term \integration group", unrelated to scholar activities and dissolved before the school year, as instrumental variable for their...