Citizens and politicians rely on their knowledge of a pension system, particularly its redistributive features, when forming their preferences and evaluating its fairness. Taking advantage of the Bismarckian rule of proportionality in Germany, we provide experimental and survey-based evidence...

How do emotions affect policy views on immigration? How do they influence the way people process and respond to factual information? We address these questions using a survey experiment in Italy, which randomly exposes around 7,000 participants to (i) sensational news about immigrant crimes,...

The implementation of evidence-based policies hinges on the dissemination of evidence to policymakers, a process influenced by the attributes of the sender. We conduct a country-wide RCT in which two ideologically opposite prominent think tanks, two major newspapers, and a research institution...

Do young politicians prioritize other types of municipal spending than old politicians? We study this question using hand-collected candidate-level data on municipal elections (1996-2020), along with detailed administrative data on municipal spending in Bavaria. Our identification strategy makes...

Though governments regularly implement fiscal adjustments to avert crisis, voter attitudes towards competing adjustment strategies are still poorly understood. A conjoint experiment with 8,000 survey respondents in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru confirms that individuals prefer spending-...

Due to a last-minute fight among the candidates, Vox, a party at the right end of the Spanish political spectrum, could not run in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a relatively representative electoral constituency, in the general election of July 23, 2023. Since this fight was a power struggle within...

On the night of November 8th 2016 Donald Trump won the US presidential election with 306 electoral votes (vs. 232 for Hilary Clinton). Most notably, all of the numerous election forecasts failed to predict Trump's victory. It was preceded by Trump's unforeseen achievement in the primaries. The...