I study the persuasive effects of slanted language, exploiting a ban on politically charged term “illegal immigrant” by Associated Press (AP) news wire. My empirical strategy combines timing with variation across media outlets in their baseline reliance AP copy. document sizable diffusion from copy to outlets. Moreover, individuals exposed through local show significantly lower support for rest...

This paper exploits the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within East Germany at end WWII to study political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi surrendered, 40 percent what would become authoritarian German Democratic Republic was initially under control but ceded less than two months later. Brief exposure increased protests during major 1953 uprising. We u...

We study the causes of sustained participation in political movements. To identify persistent effect protest participation, we randomly indirectly incentivize Hong Kong university students into an antiauthoritarian protest. role social networks, randomize this treatment’s intensity across major-cohort cells. find that incentives to attend one within a movement increase subsequent attendance but...

How do governors’ reelection motives affect policy experimentation? We develop a theoretical model of this situation, and then test the predictions in data on US state-level welfare reforms from 1978 to 2007. This period marked most dramatic shift social since New Deal. Our findings indicate that governors with strong electoral support are less likely experiment than little support. Yet, who ca...

The purpose of this note is to compute the probability of logrolling for three different probabilistic cultures. The primary finding is that the restriction of preferences to be in accord with the condition of separable preferences creates enough additional structure among voters’ preference rankings to create an increase in the likelihood that a Condorcet winner will exist with both IC and IAC...

We study a model of electoral competition where voters obtain information on candidates’ platforms through campaign advertising, and word-of-mouth communication. We show that when the costs of campaign advertising are low, an increase in word-of-mouth communication among voters causes polarization. In particular, the more voters can exchange political information between each other, the more of...

We analyze the voting behavior and ratings of judges in a popular song contest held every year in Europe. The dataset makes it possible to analyze the determinants of success, and gives a rare opportunity to run a direct test of vote trading, or logrolling. Though the votes cast may appear as resulting from logrolling, we show that they are rather driven by linguistic and cultural proximities b...

Sta expenditures in the U.S. Congress increased exponentially from 1940 to 1980, but have remained roughly constant since. A theoretical model of Congressional expenditures, bureaucratic oversight, and congressional ethics is developed to understand historical data. Such a model allows one to de ne and test a measure of the fraction of Congress that maximizes material rewards (vs. intrinsic rew...

In this paper we argue that the number of candidates running for public office, their ideological differentiation, and the intensity of campaign competition are all naturally intertwined, and jointly determined in response to the incentives provided by the electoral system. We propose a simple general equilibrium model that integrates these elements in a unitary framework, and provide a compari...

We study the recruitment of individuals in the political sector. We propose an equilibrium model of political recruitment by two political parties competing in an election. We show that political parties may deliberately choose to recruit only mediocre politicians, in spite of the fact that they could select better individuals. Furthermore, we show that this phenomenon is more likely to occur i...