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Scholars have argued that children affect their parents' political behavior, including turnout, through so-called trickle-up socialization. However, there is only limited causal evidence for this claim. Using a regression discontinuity design on a rich dataset, with validated turnout from subsets of Danish municipalities in four elections, I causally identify the effect of parenting a recently enfranchised voter. I consistently find that parents are more likely to vote when their child enters the electorate. On average across all four elections, I estimate that parents become 2.8 percentage points more likely to vote. In a context where the average turnout rate for parents is around 75%, this is a considerable effect. The effect is driven by parents whose children still live with them while there is no discernible effect for parents whose child has left home. The results are robust to a range of alternative specifications and placebo tests.

Scholars have argued that children affect their parents' political behavior, including turnout, through so-called trickle-up socialization. However, there is only limited causal evidence for this claim. Using a regression discontinuity design on a rich dataset, with validated turnout from subsets of Danish municipalities in four elections, I causally identify the effect of parenting a recently enfranchised voter. I consistently find that parents are more likely to vote when their child enters the electorate. On average across all four elections, I estimate that parents become 2.8 percentage points more likely to vote. In a context where the average turnout rate for parents is around 75%, this is a considerable effect. The effect is driven by parents whose children still live with them while there is no discernible effect for parents whose child has left home. The results are robust to a range of alternative specifications and placebo tests.

On 15 April, over a few days, Danish schools partially reopened. Only children up until the 5th grade were allowed to return to school. We present results from a two‐wave panel survey collected for parents with children in the 4th to the 7th grade in the week that schools partially reopened (Wave 1, initial N = 1,303) and again 2 weeks after (Wave 2, initial N = 1,000 re‐interviewed). Using a difference‐in‐difference analysis, we compare parents with children below and above the cut‐off. We do not find major differences in how our outcomes of interest develop. Government support decreased slightly more for parents whose children stayed at home, but child well‐being, parental stress, and economic situation mostly evolved in parallel for the two groups of families. More research is warranted on the long‐term effects of school lockdowns and reopening under different social contexts.

Abstract
Can democracies attract and elect politicians who are both high-ability and from diverse backgrounds? Using data covering the entire Danish population, including every candidate for local and national elections in 1990–2015, we explore the selection of political candidates. We show that Danish candidates and elected politicians have higher ability than the voters they represent, that selection on ability reflects individual skills rather than social background, that politicians are selected from economically diverse backgrounds, and that there is no substantial trade-off between ability and representation. Furthermore, we utilize a major structural reform, which significantly reduced the number of municipalities in Denmark, to show that increased political competition did not affect politicians' ability, economic background, or the trade-off between the two.

Scholars have argued that becoming a parent affects political behavior, including turnout. In this article, we identify the effect on turnout of having an additional child conditional on the decision to become a parent. When parents have a child, nature sometimes assigns additional children through twinning. We argue that conditional on age of parents and birth cohort this as-if randomly assigns an extra child to some parents. With a large data set of family composition and validated turnout for Danish voters, we find, consistent with additional children taking up parents' time and indirectly increasing the cost of voting, that having an additional child at the same time as another depresses turnout for both parents. Mothers who had twins in their first parity are 1.6 to 3.0 percentage points less likely to vote across three elections. For fathers, turnout is only depressed by 0.7 to 1.4 percentage points.

The rewards of politicians are a key part of the implicit contract between politicians and citizens, and the effect of these rewards on democratic legitimacy and political recruitment is a central concern in public debate and democratic theory. Using a survey experiment, we show how citizens respond to hypothetical changes in politicians' pay. The results indicate that citizens express lower levels of trust in the politicians when these politicians award themselves higher pecuniary rewards. However, our results also show that a devious strategy in which the rewards for politicians are less transparent ensures lower opposition from citizens than open and transparent strategies. Based on this, we outline a reinvigoration of the research agenda on "rewards at the top."