Rational choice theories assume that voters accurately assess the outcomes of policies. However, many important policies—such as regulating prices and introducing Pigouvian taxation—yield outcomes through indirect or equilibrium effects that may differ from their direct effects. Citizens may...

The study measures scientists' polarization on social media and its impact on public perceptions of their credibility. Analyzing 98,000 scientists on Twitter from 2016 to 2022 reveals significant divergence in expressed political opinions. An experiment assesses the impact of online political...

It is increasingly common in empirical research to merge data sets containing different units of observation. When the units are not nested, a crosswalk specifying how the units from one data source are allocated to the units of the other is needed. Unfortunately, most crosswalks are ad hoc, a...

We study a large-scale intervention designed by civil society organizations to reduce vote buying in Uganda's 2016 elections. We study this intervention in light of a model where incumbents benefit from a first-mover and valence advantage, vote buying and campaigning are complementary, and voter...

Previous studies of female suffrage have interpreted the change in voting patterns as reflecting a change in voter composition, in part because only aggregate voting data was available. We exploit the existence of separate counts for women and men votes in Chile before and after female suffrage....

Support for right-wing populist parties is characterised by considerable regional heterogeneity and especially concentrated in regions that have experienced economic decline. It remains unclear, however, whether the spatial externalities of local decline, including homelessness and crime, boost...

We present novel evidence on the value of cross-border political access. We analyze data on meetings of US multinational enterprises (MNEs) with European Commission (EC) policymakers. Meetings with Commissioners are associated with positive abnormal equity returns. We study channels of value...

Call a mechanism that associates each profile of preferences over candidates to an ambiguous act an Ambiguous Social Function (ASCF). This paper studies the strategy-proofness of ASCFs. We find that an ASCF is unanimous and strategyproof if and only if there exists a nonempty subset of voters,...

Using new data from a three-wave panel survey administered in Germany between May 2020 and May 2021, this paper studies the impact of a negative shock affecting every strata of the population, such as the development of COVID-19, on preferences for redistribution. Exploiting the plausibly...

We investigate the relationship between political attitudes and prosociality in a survey of a representative sample of the U.S. population during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that an experimental measure of prosociality correlates positively with adherence to protective...