Regression Discontinuity

Does mass protest after the police killing of an unarmed Black civilian broadly mobilize anti-police opinion or instead deepen racial and political divides? This research leverages a natural timing shock to answer that question.

Recent studies show a correlation between female representation in government and reduced corruption.

Democracy depends on election losers accepting defeat to enable peaceful transitions of power. This study asks how losing an election shapes candidates' views about whether contests are fair.

How does a major corruption scandal shape public support for democratic institutions? This study uses the unexpected timing of Brazil’s historic 2015 corruption revelations to estimate causal effects on system support.

This paper asks whether expanding pension benefits increases political participation among retirees, testing policy feedback and habit-formation theories with a causal design. The authors leverage a large pension reform in Illinois that raised benefits and use a regression discontinuity approach on administrative records to estimate turnout effects among retired public employees across multiple elections.

This paper asks whether a high-profile focusing event — the murder of George Floyd — changed citizens’ political behavior by bringing new prospective voters into the system. Using nationwide voter file data for the United States, the authors apply a regression discontinuity in time design and provide replication code for their analysis. They focus on changes in new voter registrations around the event and examine how effects vary across subgroups.

This study asks whether far‑right electoral victories change how street‑level bureaucrats treat minority service seekers, focusing on registration with general practitioners in Italian municipalities. It combines an audit-style field experiment that varied callers’ accents with a regression discontinuity design around close mayoral elections to compare responses in places where far‑right candidates narrowly won versus lost. The central contribution is evidence about whether electoral outcomes at the municipal level are associated with changes in bureaucratic impartiality in a concrete public-service interaction.

Missionaries used schooling as a route to gain adherents in Africa. This study links that historical missionary activity to long-run patterns in education, religious identity, and political behavior, showing that political impacts depend sharply on the type of regime people lived under.

Descriptive representation can strengthen democracy by making party organizations more inclusive. The central theory is that parties retain and promote incumbents according to gendered criteria, which creates disproportionate incentives for women to recruit party members. At the same time, gendered resource inequalities reduce women’s access to the patronage networks and resources typically used for recruitment. Faced with these constraints, women respond by recruiting more women—because it lowers recruitment costs, fits role expectations, and makes credit claiming easier.

Why do some U.S. cities maintain robust public services while others falter? This article argues that racial segregation exacerbates political polarization, hindering collective investment and reducing public goods spending.

This study investigates unequal outcomes in India’s national rural electrification program in Uttar Pradesh by asking two questions: whether Dalits—the lowest group in India’s caste hierarchy—received less attention when the state electrified rural communities, and whether the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the state’s Dalit party, reduced that inequality.

Does higher-quality public service lead voters to reward politicians? This question is investigated using signals of municipal school quality in Brazil, a setting particularly favorable to electoral accountability.

This paper examines how parenting children who become new eligible voters influences parents' own voting behavior. The research uses a regression discontinuity design with validated turnout data from Danish municipalities across four elections, identifying causal effects.

Does increased federal spending translate into election votes? A county-level study from 1988 to 2008 reveals voters reward presidents for local funding, especially in battleground states. This finding challenges previous null results focused on Congress.

Recent studies show incumbency advantage in candidate-centered elections can fuel political dynasties.

The traditional view of committee influence relies on congressional processes enabling blocking or shaping legislation.

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.

Compulsory voting is typically thought to close the turnout gap between rich and poor. Using Brazil—the largest country that enforces compulsory voting—evidence shows the opposite: compulsory voting increases turnout inequality by education (a proxy for socioeconomic status).

The regression discontinuity (RD) design identifies electoral effects but requires that relevant actors lack precise control over outcomes. Recent studies suggested this might not hold in large U.S. House elections, where incumbents often win close races. This paper examines whether such patterns exist elsewhere using data from the U.S. House across different periods and types of elections (statewide, state legislative, mayoral) plus national/local contests in nine other countries. No evidence was found for similar manipulation patterns in these diverse settings. The study also challenges explanations for incumbent success in close races within the U.S. system. Overall, this reinforces that RD assumptions are generally met across electoral contexts and provides guidance for researchers.