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AbstractDoes austerity influence incumbent support? Existing studies struggle with conceptualizing the evolution of austerity's impact over time, estimating a causal effect, and analysing the reactions of different voters. This study theorizes that the effect of austerity on electoral preferences is not immediate, but gradual, as voters find out about the measures' consequences via the media. It leverages a survey in the field at the time of the austerity announcement in Romania in 2010, additional survey data collected immediately after this event and comprehensive daily media coverage to show that austerity measures do not have an immediate impact on incumbent support, anticipated turnout and expressing a vote preference. Instead, there is a gradual effect that is associated with increased media attention to budgetary cuts. This natural experiment allows the estimation of the immediate causal effect of austerity on electoral intentions. Difference‐in‐differences (DID) models show that the announcement triggered a massive loss of support for the incumbent among those who had voted for the party in power only a few months before. Austerity also led to the demobilization of the governing party's supporters. There is no evidence that those most directly affected by the spending cuts are more likely to punish the incumbent party.

Although affective polarization threatens democracies, little is known about how to reduce it among one of polarization's main agents: party activists. The challenge stems from the difficulty of studying activists longitudinally and in a real-world setting. To address these issues, we study whether contact between activists acting as party delegates in the precincts on election day reduces polarization, compared to activists who have other election day responsibilities. We leverage a pre-registered study of party activists in a European democracy using a difference-in-differences framework. We employ an 8300-response three-wave panel of members of a new party, collected immediately before and after the 2020 Romanian general elections. We demonstrate that party activists are affectively polarized and are mostly polarized against the out-party elites and out-party itself. Although election-day contact with out-party peers does not substantially and robustly reduce partisan animus, all activists depolarize immediately after elections and effects persist two months later.