The Impact of the 2017 Women's March on Female Political Representation
Awarded the 2023 Mixtape Fellowship, the 2024 prize for the best research paper in a doctoral dissertation from the Italian Society of Economics and the 2025 Young Paper Award from the Renaissance in Economics Conference
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.
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: We study how politicians' adoption of social media, and the use of moral language, affect electoral returns. We compile a new dataset covering over 4,000 Twitter accounts and almost five million tweets by US House candidates over 2008-2018. We document several descriptive facts: social media use rises and falls with electoral cycles, politicians' use of moral rhetoric increased over the period of study, and moral rhetoric is strongly associated with higher social media engagement. Using a regression discontinuity design on close primary elections, we find that social media use by candidates has a positive but imprecisely estimated effect on vote shares. This effect is strongly heterogeneous depending on the use of moral rhetoric, and is large and statistically significant for candidates with above-median moral language use. A complementary design using only candidates with Twitter also reveals a causal effect of moral language on vote shares. We also document that relative to other social media features (negativity, out-group animosity, toxicity) moral rhetoric drives more positive engagement. Finally, we show that increased coverage from mainstream news media and campaign donations are important mechanisms.
Erasmus+ Mobility and Political Preferences - joint with Ruben Durante, Luca Favero and Giovanni Mastrobuoni
Reversing Roe, Mobilizing Citizens: The Effect of Roe's Overturn on Political Participation - joint with Flavia Cavallini and Chiara Santantonio