Working Papers
This paper studies the effect of malapportionment on policymaking. I argue that in malapportioned chambers, policymaking is biased in favor of overrepresented districts via a mechanical and a behavioral effect. Using data on the Italian Senate and a regression discontinuity design, I first show that multi-tier electoral systems can cause malapportionment by allowing districts with similar population sizes to elect different numbers of legislators. I then demonstrate that the local interests of overrepresented districts receive disproportionately greater attention in bill sponsorship. The effect is driven not only by the election of the additional legislator but also by the increased activism of legislators from overrepresented districts. Both geographically targeted and sectoral bills contribute to this bias. The results demonstrate the political consequences of unequal geographic representation.
Religious leaders wield significant electoral influence over their followers. In a clientelistic setting, politicians may seek to secure this influence by offering material benefits. To test this argument, we combine newly georeferenced information on the renovation history of Italian Catholic churches with a dataset of connections between Christian democratic politicians and Italian Catholic bishops. Leveraging the start of a connection with a difference-in-differences approach, we find that investments into church renovations increase when municipalities are represented by a politician with a personal connection to the sitting bishop. Additional analyses reveal that church investments increase only when bishops can plausibly mobilize support in favor of the connected politicians, and in places where Christian democrats are losing support. The findings shed new light on the individualistic strategies and motivations of elected politicians in influencing religious leaders.
This article argues that in a context of widespread clientelism and poverty, local public goods provision is a tool for mass patronage. Clientelistic incumbents under threat entice economically vulnerable voters into supporting the regime by creating jobs in the construction sector through infrastructural investments. The theory is tested using data on public works projects funded by the Cassa del Mezzogiorno, a massive place-based policy for the development of Southern Italy introduced after WWII. Empirically, I exploit within-politician shocks in competition induced by the electoral rule of the post-war Italian Senate. The results reveal that public works investments increase when Christian democratic senators are threatened in their own districts by the election of a communist senator, that this effect is particularly strong in areas characterized by low levels of employment, and that this distribution generates electoral returns.
This article proposes a novel theory of minority status and support for supranational integration. We argue that the gap in status and opportunities between majority and minority individuals affects the evaluation of international institutions. Individuals whose socioeconomic status and opportunities are restricted because of minority traits are more dissatisfied with national institutions and more favorable toward supranational integration than their majority counterparts. We test our theory on the European Union, the most advanced case of regional integration. Using different operationalizations of minority status and an exact matching strategy, we demonstrate a robust positive association between minority status and support for supranational integration. Testing the mechanisms, we present evidence that integration in the host country and discrimination drive these effects.
Previous research on party preferences has assumed that individual partisanship is unaffected by electoral outcomes, focusing instead on its pre-electoral dynamics. Our research note challenges this assumption by demonstrating that electoral outcomes can cause significant partisan shifts among voters. We argue that electoral losers are more likely to distance themselves from unsuccessful parties, while winners remain safely attached to the bandwagon. To demonstrate this, we first use household panel surveys from four European countries to establish that voters who supported declining parties are more likely to change party support in favor of gaining parties. Second, we show that individual-level partisan changes aggregate to meaningful public opinion shifts at the national level. To this purpose, we leverage monthly opinion polls for political parties across 17 European democracies and find that declining parties lose support among the electorate. Our results highlight a new dimension of post-electoral politics with implications for empirical research.