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Restrictions to media freedom, in the form of repressive defamation legislation, are thought to affect the amount of information about corruption that the media report. Exploiting variation in regulation of speech across states in a federal country, Mexico, and using a novel data set based on content analysis of the local press, I estimate the effect of lack of freedom on the coverage devoted to acts of malfeasance by public officials. Corruption receives significantly less attention in states with a more repressive defamation law. Instrumental variable models corroborate the interpretation of the negative association between regulation and coverage as a causal 'chilling effect.'. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractWe investigate the impact of globalization on electoral outcomes in 15 Western European countries over 1988–2007. We employ both official election results at the district level and individual‐level voting data, combined with party ideology scores from the Comparative Manifesto Project. We compute a region‐specific measure of exposure to Chinese imports, based on the historical industry specialization of each region. To identify the causal impact of the import shock, we instrument imports to Europe using Chinese imports to the United States. At the district level, a stronger import shock leads to (1) an increase in support for nationalist and isolationist parties, (2) an increase in support for radical‐right parties, and (3) a general shift to the right in the electorate. These results are confirmed by the analysis of individual‐level vote choices. In addition, we find evidence that voters respond to the shock in a sociotropic way.

We show that support for the Leave option in the Brexit referendum was systematically higher in regions hit harder by economic globalization. We focus on the shock of surging imports from China over the past three decades as a structural driver of divergence in economic performance across U.K. regions. An IV approach supports a causal interpretation of our finding. We claim that the effect is driven by the displacement determined by globalization in the absence of effective compensation of its losers. Neither overall stocks nor inflows of immigrants in a region are associated with higher support for the Leave option. A positive association only emerges when focusing on immigrants from EU accession countries. The analysis of individual data suggests that voters respond to the import shock in a sociotropic way, as individuals tend to react to the general economic situation of their region, regardless of their specific condition.

The increasing success of populist and radical-right parties is one of the most remarkable developments in the politics of advanced democracies. We investigate the impact of industrial robot adoption on individual voting behavior in 13 western European countries between 1999 and 2015. We argue for the importance of the distributional consequences triggered by automation, which generates winners and losers also within a given geographic area. Analysis that exploits only cross-regional variation in the incidence of robot adoption might miss important facets of this process. In fact, patterns in individual indicators of economic distress and political dissatisfaction are masked in regional-level analysis, but can be clearly detected by exploiting individual-level variation. We argue that traditional measures of individual exposure to automation based on the current occupation of respondents are potentially contaminated by the consequences of automation itself, due to direct and indirect occupational displacement. We introduce a measure of individual exposure to automation that combines three elements: 1) estimates of occupational probabilities based on employment patterns prevailing in the preautomation historical labor market, 2) occupation-specific automatability scores, and 3) the pace of robot adoption in a given country and year. We find that individuals more exposed to automation tend to display higher support for the radical right. This result is robust to controlling for several other drivers of radical-right support identified by earlier literature: nativism, status threat, cultural traditionalism, and globalization. We also find evidence of significant interplay between automation and these other drivers.