The Rise and Fall of Local Elections in China

By Monica Martinez-Bravo, Gerard Padró i Miquel, Nancy Qian, and Yang Yao

American Economic Review, September 2022

We posit that autocrats introduce local elections when their bureaucratic capacity is low. Local elections exploit citizens' informational advantage in keeping local officials accountable, but they also weaken vertical control. As bureaucratic capacity ...

Dispersed Behavior and Perceptions in Assortative Societies

By Mira Frick, Ryota Iijima, and Yuhta Ishii

American Economic Review, September 2022

We formulate a model of social interactions and misinferences by agents who neglect assortativity in their society, mistakenly believing that they interact with a representative sample of the population. A key component of our approach is the interplay be...

Polarization, Valence, and Policy Competition

By Peter Buisseret and Richard Van Weelden

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2022

We study an election between two office-seeking candidates who are polarized along a partisan issue dimension when one candidate has a valence advantage. The candidates compete by choosing policy on a second issue dimension about which voters' preferences...

The Political Economy of Populism

By Sergei Guriev and Elias Papaioannou

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2022

We synthesize the literature on the recent rise of populism. First, we discuss definitions and present descriptive evidence on the recent increase in support for populists. Second, we cover the historical evolution of populist regimes since the late nin...

Book Review: Entrenchment by Paul Starr

By Gilles Saint-Paul

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2022

Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies, by Paul Starr, revisits the history of political economy through the lens of a novel concept: that of entrenchment. Policies that benefit some interest groups may become e...

The Historical Perspective on the Donald Trump Puzzle: A Review of Barry Eichengreen's The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era

By Konstantin Sonin

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2022

In The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era, Barry Eichengreen relies on historical and contemporary evidence to analyze major episodes of populism in the twenty-first century, the Trump election in the...

Review of Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women's Vote

By Toke S. Aidt

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2022

Recent years have seen several 100-year anniversaries of the women's vote, and today universal and equal suffrage is an inseparable part of democracy. Dawn Teele's book, Forging the Franchise, is an inquiry into the reasons why male politicians...

Money and Politics: The Effects of Campaign Spending Limits on Political Entry and Competition

By Eric Avis, Claudio Ferraz, Frederico Finan, and Carlos Varjão

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

This paper studies the effects of campaign spending limits on the political entry, selection, and behavior of local politicians in Brazil. We analyze a reform that limits campaign spending for mayoral elections. The limits were implemented with a disconti...

The Impact of Presidential Appointment of Judges: Montesquieu or the Federalists?

By Sultan Mehmood

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

A central question in development economics is whether there are adequate checks and balances on the executive. This paper provides causal evidence of how increasing constraints on the executive—via removal of presidential discretion in judicial appoint...

Demagogues and the Economic Fragility of Democracies

By Dan Bernhardt, Stefan Krasa, and Mehdi Shadmehr

American Economic Review, October 2022

We investigate the susceptibility of democracies to demagogues, studying tensions between representatives who guard voters' long-run interests and demagogues who cater to voters' short-run desires. Parties propose consumption and investment. Voters base c...

Fake News, Voter Overconfidence, and the Quality of Democratic Choice

By Melis Kartal and Jean-Robert Tyran

American Economic Review, October 2022

This paper studies, theoretically and experimentally, the effects of overconfidence and fake news on information aggregation and the quality of democratic choice in a common-interest setting. We theoretically show that overconfidence exacerbates the adver...

How Merchant Towns Shaped Parliaments: From the Norman Conquest of England to the Great Reform Act

By Charles Angelucci, Simone Meraglia, and Nico Voigtländer

American Economic Review, October 2022

We study the emergence of urban self-governance in the late medieval period. We focus on England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, building a novel comprehensive dataset of 554 medieval towns. During the Commercial Revolution (twelfth to thirteenth centu...

Persistent Polarizing Effects of Persuasion: Experimental Evidence from Turkey

By Ceren Baysan

American Economic Review, November 2022

I evaluate randomly varied neighborhood exposure to information campaigns regarding either executive performance, or increases in executive power, prior to a Turkish referendum on weakening checks and balances on the executive. The campaigns increased vot...

Vulnerability and Clientelism

By Gustavo J. Bobonis, Paul J. Gertler, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, and Simeon Nichter

American Economic Review, November 2022

This study argues that economic vulnerability causes citizens to participate in clientelism, a phenomenon with various pernicious consequences. To examine how reduced vulnerability affects citizens' participation in clientelism, we employ two exogenous sh...

Voting Agendas and Preferences on Trees: Theory and Practice

By Andreas Kleiner and Benny Moldovanu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We study how parliaments and committees select one out of several alternatives when options cannot be ordered along a "left-right" axis. Which voting agendas are used in practice, and how should they be designed? We assume that preferences are single peak...

Making Elections Work: Accountability with Selection and Control

By Vincent Anesi and Peter Buisseret

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We study the limits of dynamic electoral accountability when voters are uncertain about politicians' characteristics (adverse selection) and their actions (moral hazard). Existing work argues that voters cannot achieve their first-best payoff. This is att...

Accountability and Grand Corruption

By Cesar Martinelli

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We propose a model of political careers and electoral accountability in an environment in which politicians may take bribes at different stages of their careers and in which politicians' actions are only imperfectly observed by voters. We show that the ex...

Gerrymandering in State Legislatures: Frictions from Axiomatic Bargaining

By Hisam Sabouni and Cameron A. Shelton

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

Theories of partisan redistricting postulate unitary actors maximizing their party's expected seat share. Yet, the partition of a fixed supply of friendly voters necessarily implies a tragedy of the commons. We recast partisan redistricting as a bargainin...

Partisan Fertility and Presidential Elections

By Gordon B. Dahl, Runjing Lu, and William Mullins

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2022

Changes in political leadership drive sharp changes in public policy and partisan beliefs about the future. We exploit the surprise 2016 election of Trump to identify the effects of a shift in political power on one of the most consequential household dec...

Local Policy Choice: Theory and Empirics

By David R. Agrawal, William H. Hoyt, and John D. Wilson

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2022

This paper critically surveys the growing literature on the policy choices of local governments. First, we identify various reasons for local government policy interactions, including fiscal competition, bidding for firms, yardstick competition, expendi...