Suchergebnisse

This paper exploits the presence of Congressional experience in US governors that permits the identification of the relationship between political career experience and intergovernmental transfers. I assemble a novel dataset of governors' political background and match this to federal transfer data from 1950 to 2008. Governors with Congressional experience have 0.8 percentage points more transfers to their state. I show evidence for one potential channel that this may act through, the federal grants system. The findings are robust to outliers in the data, selection effects, close elections and an alternative dependent variable based on a state's share of total federal transfers

Does radical right political violence favour or hinder public support for right-wing stances? Numerous existing studies have demonstrated that Islamic terrorism provokes a conservative shift, increases nationalism and induces negative sentiments towards immigration. However, little is known about the consequences of far-right terrorism, despite its incidence in Western societies. We leverage four waves of the British Election Study (BES) and use a quasi-experimental design to analyse individual political orientations shortly before and after terrorist attacks. We find that respondents distance themselves from the ideology associated with the perpetrator and shift away from ideological positions at the right end of the political spectrum. Furthermore, respondents are less likely to report nationalistic attitudes and immigration skepticism, core tenets of extremist right-wing political ideologies. Our findings suggest that the characteristics of the perpetrators and their driving goals are crucial factors shaping the impact of terrorism on public sentiments.

Exploiting novel longitudinal data on individuals in Great Britain matched to their parliamentary constituency, we find that supporting the incumbent political party, at both the national and constituency levels, exerts a positive influence on individual subjective wellbeing. This relationship varies across different measures of subjective wellbeing, gender and personal characteristics. We then implement a regression discontinuity in time design to estimate the impact of a quasi‐natural experiment, where we exploit the timing of the survey around the 2010 election date in order to identify a causal relationship. We find that Liberal Democrat supporters have approximately one‐unit higher level of overall life satisfaction after their party's electoral success.