A vast and growing quantitative literature considers how social networks shape political mobilization but the degree to which turnout decisions are strategic remains ambiguous. Unlike previous studies, we establish personal links between voters and candidates and exploit discontinuous incentives...

This paper investigates whether distributional conflicts become more likely when groups are involved in the fight. We present results from a laboratory experiment in which two parties can appropriate resources via a contest or, alternatively, take an outside option. Keeping monetary gains...

We estimate the impact of female leaders on intimate partner violence experienced by women in districts from which they are elected. Exposure to female leaders in state legislatures in India increases the likelihood that female constituents in rural areas report experiencing physical violence...

We propose a class of decisive collective choice rules that rely on a linear ordering to partition the majority relation into two acyclic relations. The first of these relations is used to pare down the set of the feasible alternatives into a shortlist while the second is used to make a final...

We study consumer debt relief as a tool of distributive politics and ask if debt relief can influence elections. We utilize quasi-experimental variation generated by a very large debt relief program enacted in the Republic of Georgia by a private foundation that affected every sixth voter. We...

This paper provides a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the effect of key parameters of ranking algorithms, namely popularity and personalization parameters, on measures of platform engagement, misinformation and polarization. The results show that an increase in the weight assigned to...

We evaluate how traditional parties may respond to populist parties on issues that are particularly fitting for populist messages. The testing ground is the 2020 Italian referendum on the reduction of members of Parliament. We implement a large-scale field experiment, with almost one million...

We study the economic implications of regional favoritism, a form of distributive politics that redistributes resources geographically within countries. Using enterprise surveys from low- and middle-income countries, we document that firms located close to leaders' birthplaces grow substantially...

In this paper, we discuss new data on party affiliations within ministries to characterize party-political appointments in high- and mid-level bureaucracy, from 1999 to 2018. We argue that party cleavages within these organizational structures are significant and, to analyze the variation...