This paper analyzes the existence of electoral cycles in infrastructure provision in the context of a large rural road building program in India. We use data covering 150,000 roads over a decade to demonstrate an increase in road building activity before state elections. These electoral cycles...

This paper examines the link between political support for basic income funded by linear income taxation and income inequality by household and gender. We develop a model with an increasingly right-skewed distribution of skill across households and a gender wage gap within households. Household...

Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for pro-climate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. In this paper, we estimate causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling...

The existence of dominant parties in democracies is an enduring puzzle, in part because spatial models of voting suggest that an opposition party should be able to challenge the incumbent by proposing more popular policies. We consider the preeminent case of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party...

In a functioning democracy, the legitimacy of government rests on citizens' confidence in the political system and its decisions. The ability to express preferences and consider these preferences in decision-making is a critical aspect of democracy. This study investigates the impact of voting...

A lack of transparency about policy performance can pose a major obstacle to welfare-enhancing policy competition across jurisdictions. In parallel surveys with German citizens and state parliamentarians, we document that both groups misperceive the performance of their state’s education...

In the Philippine political dynamics, political patronage has been observed, especially in the local government units. The study’s objectives include determining the different forms of benefits that political patrons offer as observed by local voters, the reasons behind their participation,...

Economic underdevelopment is due in part to the politics of clientelism, including ethnic favoritism and ethnic voting. Empirical studies of ethnic voting face a trade-off between studying coarse variation in ethnicity over wide geographic scales and studying local variation in ethnicity over...

The scholarly interest in the political consequences of industrial decline across Western nations is growing. Despite the current global energy crisis, the electoral impact of increasing natural gas and electricity prices has received less attention, even though it represents a direct threat to...

We estimate 3% of the U.S. voter population is registered to vote in two states. Which state these double-registrants choose to vote in reflects incentives and costs, being more prevalent in swing states (higher incentive) and states which automatically send out mail-in ballots (lower cost). We...