Using data from 1869-1928, we estimate the effect of party control of state elected offices on the entry, exit, circulation, and content of Republican and Democratic daily newspapers. We exploit changes over time in party control of the governorship and state legislatures in a...

As one of the strongest determinants of the vote choice of United States citizens, party identification has been the object of extensive scholarly attention. Despite fifty years of research, its place in the funnel of causality and its applicability outside the United States remains unclear. In...

This Article examines what law can do to enable an electorate comprised of mostly ignorant voters to obtain meaningful representation and to hold elected officials accountable for the government's performance. Drawing on a half-century of research by political scientists, we argue that political...

The increased occurrence of extreme weather conditions leading to drought is a key development challenge. This paper studies how these extreme events interact with the political process at the local level using rich administrative data for drought declarations and mayoral elections in Brazil....

We first study theoretically how intergovernmental relations affect political budget cycles (PBCs) within federal countries, introducing a national incumbent that favors aligned districts in a model where discretionary fiscal policy is subject to credibility problems. Then we analyze Argentina's...

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 study whether incumbents facing uncontested elections channel public spending towards co‐partisan officials more than is the case of incumbents that are worried about their chances of re‐election. To do so, we draw on data detailing capital transfers allocated by Spanish regions to local...

Much of what we know about the alignment of voters with parties comes from mass surveys of the electorate in the postwar period or from aggregate electoral data. Using individual elector level panel data from 19th-century United Kingdom poll books, we reassess the development of a party-centred...

How does communication among voters affect turnout? In a laboratory experiment, subjects, divided into two competing parties, choose between costly voting and abstaining. Pre-play communication treatments, relative to the No Communication control, are Public Communication (subjects exchange...

Far-right and far-left parties by definition occupy the fringes of politics, with policy proposals outside the mainstream. This paper asks how public attitudes about such policies respond once an extreme party increases their political representation at the local level. We study attitudes...