As climate impacts grow, governments face pressure to adopt costly mitigation policies that many voters resist because of their economic and distributional costs. Theodore Tallent, Malo Jan, and Luis Sattelmayer ask whether non‑material, communicative tools—what they call "symbolic policies"—can increase public support for more stringent climate measures without changing their material costs.
This paper asks whether and how electoral rules affect politicians’ incentives to pursue programmatic redistribution, exploiting France’s switch to—and later abandonment of—proportional representation in the interwar period. Using new data on deputies’ legislative initiatives and manifesto commitments, the authors compare the same politicians under different electoral rules to isolate how open-list PR versus single-member majoritarian rules related to programmatic effort in both parliamentary behavior and campaigning. The contribution is a within-politician comparison that tests whether open-list PR reduced programmatic redistribution relative to majoritarian rules, and situates the results in dialogue with both economic and political-science theories of electoral systems.
This study investigates whether anxiety increases voters' intensity of preference for the status quo, producing a political "flight to safety" that advantages establishment candidates during crises.
Anna M. Meyerrose and Sara Watson investigate how sudden increases in import competition shape the policy positions of mainstream legislators. As support for parties at the ideological extremes grows across advanced democracies, understanding whether and how economic shocks move elected elites—rather than just voters—helps explain changes in party competition, representation, and policy making.
This study examines how French citizens hold powerful prime ministers accountable beyond policy results.
New research on the historical origins of old-age pensions from a political regime perspective shows stark differences between democratic and nondemocratic systems. Democratic regimes introduced significantly higher legal pension coverage rates than their autocratic counterparts.
Political decision-making often relies on arbitrary population thresholds to determine local government structures. This article examines how such rules shape municipal governance across different European contexts.
We ran a large-scale experimental intervention during the 2012 French elections. Data & Methods Our study involved randomly assigning 20,500 apartments to different canvassing groups.