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The first chapter of this dissertation investigates how financial frictions affect companies' product market decisions. As different products have different production cycles, I find that companies focus on products entailing short cash flow maturity as a way of alleviating financial constraints. The second chapter focuses on a randomized controlled trial where a financial education course was offered to managers of medium and large companies in Mozambique. The results suggest that financial education improves corporate practices and performance. The final chapter analyses the impact of information on electoral behaviour. We expose 1800 participants to information about central government performance and evaluate its impact on voting in local elections.

Explores challenges facing scholars conducting electoral research, why conventional pre- and/or post-election studies are ill-equipped to address these challenges, and how the studies could be adapted; 9 articles and a concluding essay. Based on papers presented at a conference held at the University of Houston, Houston, Texas, Mar. 1999. Contents: The state of election studies: Mid-life crisis or new youth? by John Curtice; Varieties of election studies, by K. Knight and M. Marsh; Design issues in electoral research: taking care of (core) business, by Cees van der Eijk; Electoral context, by M. Marsh; Contextual data and the study of elections and voting behavior: connecting individuals to environments, by M. Johnson, W. Phillips Shively and R.M. Stein; Designing multi-level studies: sampling voters and electoral contexts, by Laura Stoker and Jake Bowers; National election studies and macro analysis, by R.S. Erikson; The rolling cross-section design, by Richard Johnston and Henry E. Brady; The statistical power of election studies to detect media exposure effects in political campaigns, by John Zaller.

Polish local elections in 2018, many months before their commencement, became one of the main elements of the political discourse. Due to the specificity of the electoral calendar, for the first time since the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2015, voters had to assess the actions taken by the Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) in the electoral act. Of course, this could only happen indirectly, precisely through local elections, which due to their specificity, are not able to fully reflect the balance of powers that operates on the national arena. However, also in this way voters could refer to national events. Expressing support for them by voting on PiS, or by showing negations of their actions by voting for groups remaining in opposition. The aim of the paper is to check whether, in the perception of voters, events on the national political arena determine the behavior of two types of participants in local elections: local politicians and voters.

This PhD dissertation consists of four self-contained chapters in the field of Political Development Economics. They are all empirical projects studying decision-making under heterogeneous conditions. In the first chapter, I investigate the causal link between economic expectations and voting in an independence referendum, and document that the effect is contingent upon voters' identity. In the second chapter we map state capacity at the subnational level in Africa and show that the risk of oil induced conflicts depends on levels of local state capacity. The third chapter focuses on the link between food scarcity and cooperative investments. Exploiting the harvest as an exogenous shock to food supply in rural Tanzania, we document a causal role of food scarcity in suppressing socially efficient cooperation. The fourth and final chapter studies moral decision making in Greenland. We develop a measure of parochial honesty - the propensity to behave honestly toward the ingroup but not toward the outgroup - and show that market exposure predicts the degree of group differentiation.

According to numerous recent cross-national studies of public support for democracy, citizens of both well-established and newer democracies continue to share a strong commitment to the ideals and principles of representative democracy. Paradoxically, however, these same citizens are increasingly 'critical' of and 'dissatisfied' with the performance of their national democratic institutions. One response has been to call for the 're-invention of government' through the use of referendums and ballot initiatives. This article explores what happens when the national referendum was introduced in Portugal in 1998 - a polity that only recently consolidated its transition to democracy. We examine in some depth the context under which the referendum was introduced and its results in terms of electoral behaviour. The main goals are to explain both abstention and vote choice in the 1998 Portuguese referendums, analysing the role of political parties, social structural factors and pressure groups on those phenomena. (European Journal of Political Research (/ FUB)

The New Political Economy1 is based on the postulate of homo politicus that Downs (1957) presents as the clone of homo oeconomicus, a rational agent mo- tivated by the maximisation of his material self-interest. Goodin and Roberts (1975) were the first to propose an alternative to the homo politicus postulate by introducing the notion of 'ethical voter' 2. The 'ethical voter' describes a rational agent who is not only motivated by the maximisation of his short term material self-interest but also by the promotion of what he considers as fair for the society as a whole. There have been so far only few attempts to model 'ethical voting'. Most of them liken 'ethical voting' to caring about the well-being of the worst-off when voting (see Snyder and Kramer (1988), Kranich (2001) and Galasso (2003)). Alesina and Angeletos (2005) constitute an exception. Following responsibility-based theories of justice, they assume that individuals share the conviction that one deserves the income on the basis of his skill and effort and that only luck creates unfair differences they are consequently willing to compensate. However, the 'responsibility cut' (Dworkin (1981)) used by Alesina and Angeletos (2005) lacks justification, should one consider the theoretical literature on fair redistribution or the empirical literature on individual opinions on distributive justice. I propose to analyze 'ethical voting' in a more comprehensive way. The thread of this work is a 'fair utility function'. More precisely, I specify in paper 1 a 'fair utility function' to model citizens' trade-off between their self-interest and some of their major concerns for fairness. Paper 2 and paper 3 rely on the 'fair utility function' to study voting behavior over the (re)distribution of economic surpluses in different contexts of democracy4. In paper 2, my coauthor and I compute the politico-economic equilibrium that emerges when citizens are endowed with the 'fair utility function'. We model the institutional setting of a typical Western democracy where ...

Two dynamic rational choice models of primaries are analyzed that demonstrate both reformers and their critics are right about primaries. Primaries can provide public instruction and a better informed electorate, and they can be poorly designed lotteries: A "recognition" and learning model describes how changing media coverage affects voters' knowledge about candidates and their subsequent voting behavior. A "strategic" voting model describes the dynamic implications of strategic voting and "horse-race" coverage by the media. We find that the recognition model has the normatively appealing dynamic of information leading to broadly self-interested outcomes while the strategy model has the unappealing behavior of a lottery the odds of which are fixed by the media's harsh judgments of who's winning and who's losing.In coming to these conclusions, this paper illustrates a number of methodological points such as the usefulness of macromodels based upon assumptions about individual behavior, the analysis of macromodels using methods from electrical engineering, the strengths and limitations of analytical results versus simulations for understanding dynamic models, and the use of "ideal type" recognition and strategic voting models to clarify the systemic consequences of individual risk aversion and strategic voting. More generally, the paper shows how models can be used as narratives or parables for organizing disparate observations, refining our intuitions, and directing our research efforts.

What effect do economic sanctions have on the foreign policy orientation of sanctioned (target) countries towards sanctioning (sender) countries? Do sanctions create more or fewer incentives for targets to pursue divergent foreign policy agendas from that of their senders in major international forums? We posit that economic sanctions escalate tension between target and sender countries, prompting target governments to vote against the interests of sender countries at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). To assess the empirical merits of this theoretical claim, we combine US sanctions data with the data on the UNGA votes for over 150 countries for the 1984–2006 period. The findings show that US sanctions, particularly high-cost sanctions, are significantly associated with more dissimilar UNGA votes between the US and its targets. Our analysis suggests that sanctions not only often fail to achieve their intended policy goals but also instigate more defiant behavior by target countries.

International audience ; The Political Legislation Cycle theory predicts a peak of legislative production in the pre-electoral period, when legislators focus on voters' welfare to be reelected. This paper verifies the theory on South Korean legislative production (1948–2016); it is the first test of the theory in a country undergoing a process of democratization, thus providing evidence relevant also for the conditional political cycles literature. Two insofar untested hypotheses are verified: 1) peaks of legislative production should increase with the degree of democracy; 2) as the party system and the mechanisms of legislative checks and balances develop, the PLC should become more evident in bills of legislative rather than executive's initiative. A hurdle model estimated on both laws of parliamentary proposal and of government assignment lends empirical support to both hypotheses, with the noticeable feature that PLC in Korea appear more in the form of an upward trend than of pre-electoral peaks. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

International audience ; The Political Legislation Cycle theory predicts a peak of legislative production in the pre-electoral period, when legislators focus on voters' welfare to be reelected. This paper verifies the theory on South Korean legislative production (1948–2016); it is the first test of the theory in a country undergoing a process of democratization, thus providing evidence relevant also for the conditional political cycles literature. Two insofar untested hypotheses are verified: 1) peaks of legislative production should increase with the degree of democracy; 2) as the party system and the mechanisms of legislative checks and balances develop, the PLC should become more evident in bills of legislative rather than executive's initiative. A hurdle model estimated on both laws of parliamentary proposal and of government assignment lends empirical support to both hypotheses, with the noticeable feature that PLC in Korea appear more in the form of an upward trend than of pre-electoral peaks. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

International audience ; The Political Legislation Cycle theory predicts a peak of legislative production in the pre-electoral period, when legislators focus on voters' welfare to be reelected. This paper verifies the theory on South Korean legislative production (1948–2016); it is the first test of the theory in a country undergoing a process of democratization, thus providing evidence relevant also for the conditional political cycles literature. Two insofar untested hypotheses are verified: 1) peaks of legislative production should increase with the degree of democracy; 2) as the party system and the mechanisms of legislative checks and balances develop, the PLC should become more evident in bills of legislative rather than executive's initiative. A hurdle model estimated on both laws of parliamentary proposal and of government assignment lends empirical support to both hypotheses, with the noticeable feature that PLC in Korea appear more in the form of an upward trend than of pre-electoral peaks. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

Examined is the voting behavior of the three major Belgian parties -- CVP (Christian Democrats), BSP (Socialists), & PVV (Liberals) -- during three legislatures in which all three parties were twice in government & once in the opposition. The cohesion between the government parties & within each party was very high: cohesion within the government was 99.97% in 1958-1961. Deviations from the "party line" were minimal, especially within the BSP: 0.32% of BSP members voted against the party line in 1954-1958; the highest deviation (2.51%) was found among CVP members in 1961-1965. In the final votes two voting patterns dominate: government vs opposition & unanimity. All amendments except those introduced by the government were rejected. It is concluded that the role of the public session of the House of Representatives is reduced to a mere registration function. 5 Tables. Modified HA.

Despite controversial debates about the social acceptability of its nationalist program, the rightwing populist AfD has recently entered all state parliaments as well as the federal parliament in Germany. Although professed AfD voters faced a likely risk of social stigmatization, electoral support followed a clear upward trend. In order to explain these dynamics, we analyze the impact of information shocks with respect to aggregate-level AfD support on individual party choices. Unexpectedly high aggregate support for a populist party may indicate a higher social acceptance of its platform and reduce the social desirability bias in self-reported party preferences. Consequently, the likelihood to reveal an AfD preference increases. We test this mechanism in an event-study approach, exploiting quasi-random variation in survey interviews conducted closely around German state elections. We define election information shocks as deviations of actual AfD vote shares from pre-election polls and link these to the individual disposition to report an AfD preference in subsequent survey interviews. Our results suggest that exposure to higher-than expected AfD support significantly increases the individual probability to report an AfD vote intention by up to 3 percentage points.