Research

Working paper:

Marrying the Right One — Evidence on Social Network Effects in Politics from the Venetian Republic

Abstract: In this paper I measure the effect of social networks on politicians' career development. To this purpose, I construct a unique data set that contains information on the social network of the entire electorate of a sovereign nation, the 15th-century Republic of Venice. I identify the careers of 2.500 married politicians from the period between 1400 and 1524. Analyzing this panel of data I provide evidence that marrying the daughter of a more central father significantly improves the husband's career prospects in politics. Moreover, I show that this effect is independent from other characteristics of either families, like historical prestige, wealth or voting power (family size), and it is not biased by assortative marriages. JEL codes: D72, H11

Work in progress

Endogenous Faction Competition — Evidence from the Venetian Republic

Abstract: This paper presents a model of the competition between political factions. In the model competition happens on two levels at the elections. First, the faction members compete with each other for the candidacy of their faction, and after announcing the ballot, the factions compete to secure positions for their candidates. In the model the contest success function of the faction is endogenous: it depends on the number and the position of all the faction members. With the help of the model I analyze political competition in the 15th-century Republic of Venice and I find that extended families (casate) acted as factions. I find that family members in Venice worked in a coordinated and highly hierarchical manner to win positions for the family. Jel codes: D72, P48

Power Networks — A network approach to voting theory

Abstract: This paper points out an important shortcoming of the use of eigenvector or betweenness centrality in political networks to find the key political player. I introduce a voting model where the candidates and the voters are connected by social links and these links form a social network. In the model the voters derive their electoral preferences from the distances in the social network and vote for the "closest" candidate. Then I show the limitation of the use of eigenvector and betweenness centrality in this model: these measures are unable to identify the Condorcet candidate if the network is sufficiently small and sparse. Finally I suggest an alternative centrality measure that performs better finding the Condorcet winner candidate. JEL codes: D72, D85 (Note: this paper is under revision, it will be online soon. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the EPCS 2017 Meeting, the ASSET 2016 Meeting, the ESA 2016 European Meeting and in the poster session of the AEA/ASSA 2017 Meeting)