Immigration has increasingly taken centre-stage in the political landscape. Part of this has been rise in far-right, anti-immigration parties in a range of countries. Existing evidence suggests that the presence of immigrants has a substantial effect on the political views of the electorate,...

We develop and empirically test a theory concerning individual beliefs about whether immigrants should culturally assimilate into the host society or preserve their own cultural norms. We argue that when national identity is a source of intrinsic utility, the longevity of national identity...

In this experiment, voters select a leader who can either act in the public interest, i.e. make efficient and equitable policy choices, or act in a corrupt way, i.e. use public funds for private gain. Voters can observe candidates' pro-social behavior and their score in a cognitive ability test...

We experimentally contrast mathematical versus operational explanations of Tullock lottery contests. We contrast a protocol explaining the contest in terms of probability of winning, with an operational approach that carries out the random component of the contest as an explicit lottery each...

Despite the extensive literature on distributive politics, we still lack a theory of how political and fiscal institutions interact to shape the pork‐barrelling ability of national leaders in a federal parliamentary democracy. Focusing on party system attributes and governmental incentives...

Can televised political advertising change voting behavior in elections held in authoritarian regimes? We study the case of Chile, where the opposition used television campaigns weeks before the election that ended the seventeen-year dictatorship known as the Pinochet regime. Using national...

This paper examines the effect of party affiliation on an individual's political views. To do this, we exploit the party realignment that occurred in the U.S. due to abortion becoming a more prominent and highly partisan issue over time. We show that abortion was not a highly partisan issue in...

This study relies on a constitutional reform introducing term limits at the local elections level in Portugal as a natural experiment to estimate incumbency advantage in mayoral elections. It stresses the distinction between partisan and personal incumbency advantage using data on six local...

Electoral institutions interact through the incentives they provide to policy makers and voters. In this paper divided government is interpreted as the reaction of voters to a systematic control problem. Voters realize that term-limited executives (“lame ducks”) cannot credibly commit to a...

This study analyzes whether enabling people to get informed about redistributive consequences is an effective measure to prevent equivalence framing in the domain of voting on redistribution. Utilizing a simplified version of the Meltzer-Richard model, an equivalent frame is induced by letting...