Research

Working papers:

Abstract: Can female-led protests enhance women's participation in the political sphere? The 2017 Women's March is the largest single-day protest to ever happen in the US and a showcase of female leadership. I exploit the geographic variation in congressional districts' exposure to protests to investigate the impact of the March on the supply of female politicians in partisan primaries. Utilizing difference-in-differences designs and event-study analyses that leverage closeness to the nearest protest, I find heterogeneous results across partisan primaries. The March affects the supply of female Republican politicians: doubling closeness leads to a 60\% increse of the share of female conservative candidates. The March also increases the demand for women in Republican primaries, but there is no evidence of an effect on the probability that a woman wins her primary. As regards Democratic primaries, I find no evidence of an effect of the uprisings. Moreover, I investigate the consequences for women's representation in federal politics. My results point towards the Democratic Party implementing a strategy that allows them to capitalize on the Women's March and to gain seats in the US House.

Work in progress:

Moral Characters: Social Media and U.S. Congressional Elections - joint with Edoardo Grillo and Juan Morales

Awarded the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada Insight Development Grant.- 72,248 Canadian $

Abstract: This paper examines how social media, and the moral language used by political leaders on these platforms, affects electoral outcomes. Using a new dataset of around 13 million U.S. House congressional candidates’ tweets, we begin our analysis by describing how candidates’ social media use emerged and evolved over the last fifteen years. We use text analysis and data on social media engagement to explore the supply and demand of moral rhetoric on Twitter. We show that moral language on Twitter is positively and strongly correlated with both social media engagement and electoral returns. Then, using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) on primary elections, we show that social media use affects electoral outcomes. Heterogeneity analysis provides evidence that the effect is driven by candidates who tend to use moral language in their posts.

Do Protests have a Behavioral Effect? The Case of the 2017 Women's March