As immigration to Europe has increased, so has support for extremist parties. While many studies have examined the effect of immigration on election outcomes, few have probed the effect of asylum seekers – those fleeing strife and persecution – on voting, nor has there been much research on...

Drawing on panel data from six elections between 1998 and 2017 in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of immigration – described by Germany’s interior minister as the "mother of all political problems" – on electoral support for the far right and the far left. Our identification...

Broadening democracy by lowering the voting age is on the political agenda in many democratic societies. Previous suffrage extensions suggest that there are systematic differences between what parliaments decide and what voters want with respect to enfranchisement of new groups. This paper...

We study the effect of strategic and partisan voting on electoral outcomes, and on the relative popularity of the victor. Voters are randomly assigned to be partisan or strategic. When all voters are strategic in a plurality election, any equilibrium manipulation of the outcome elects a popular...

We estimate the impact of immigration on the upsurge of populism in Italy. Our data considers electoral results at municipality level of the Senate of the Italian Republic and the Chamber of Deputies over the period 2006-2018. Findings in our research point toward a positive impact of the share...

An important concern about the surge in the number of arriving refugees in Europe is increased support for far-right, nationalist, anti-immigration parties. This paper studies a natural experiment in an Austrian state to identify the causal effect of exposure to refugees in the neighborhood on...

How did the large asylum-seeker inflow to Germany in 2015 affect concerns about immigration? Using individual-level panel data for the years 2012–2018, I show that after 2015 concerns about immigration increased by about 21 pp. and support for extreme right-wing parties by about 1.7 pp. These...

This paper shows how white migration out of the postbellum South diffused and entrenched Confederate culture across the United States at a critical juncture of westward expansion and postwar reconciliation. These migrants laid the groundwork for Confederate symbols and racial norms to become...

I begin with a mea culpa. In 2016, I published an article about citizen’s arrest. The idea for the article arose in 2014, when a disgruntled Virginia citizen came in off the street and attempted to arrest a law school professor while class was in progress. I set out to research and write a...

How can we know how much racial animus costs black candidates if few voters will admit such socially unacceptable attitudes to surveys? I use a new, non-survey proxy for an area’s racial animus: Google search queries that include racially charged language. I compare the proxy to an area’s...