"Failure to Launch: The impact of major party candidate dropout"
Abstract: Prominent partisan divides may inflate support for major party candidates, reinforcing their dominance. To test this, I exploit quasi-exogenous variation in the presence of one of two major political parties, arising from an unanticipated failure by the party to register candidates in some local government elections in New South Wales, Australia. I combine a difference-in-differences approach with detailed ballot-level ranking data. With this, I create a benchmark that separates out the mechanical substitution effect that arises from candidate absence even when voters rank candidates the same way. I find that the remaining major party's vote share falls significantly short of this benchmark, by 7.1 percentage points of enrolled voters. This shortfall is equivalent to 14.2 seats' worth of votes across all affected contests in which the party stood. Analysis of a corpus of candidate statements taken from online news articles is consistent with the framing of the contest changing in the absence of one major party—away from references to candidates' own parties, and towards communal moral language. These results suggest that major parties benefit from the partisan framing that their rivalry creates.
"Secession Clauses: Let them decide (to stay)"
Journal of Public Economics, Revised and Resubmitted (2nd round) [SSRN Article]
Abstract: This paper studies how central governments can deter secessionist movements by changing the decision structure of independence votes. Secession clauses — which promise to allow secession whenever a region likes — deter secession by making the decision to remain day-to-day rather than once-and-for-all, as is the case under a single vote. Surprisingly, the optimal decision structure from the government’s perspective follows an alternating pattern: provide a once-and-for-all vote when the region’s desire to secede is high or low, provide a clause when the desire is intermediate, and costly waiting in between. Greater pro-independence conflict, government instability, and uncertainty about the future benefits of secession can all contribute to the introduction of a secession clause. The impact of secession clauses on stability of a union is ambiguous: allowing clauses (cf. prohibiting them) increases the probability that secession eventually occurs, but can still improve the stability of the union in the sense of the union being longer-lived. The analysis highlights the surprising potential of secession clauses as deterrents.
"Politics of Food: An Experiment on Trust in Expert Regulation and Economic Costs of Political Polarization" (with Jared Gars and Mateusz Stalinski)
Economic Journal, Forthcoming [Published Article (open access)] [SSRN Article]
Abstract: Rising polarisation heightens concerns about politicising regulatory agencies, prompting reassessment of the accountability–independence trade-off. We study whether perceived out-group oversight affects trust in regulation and market behaviour. Using US television transcripts, we show that media link agencies with presidents. We then conduct a field experiment (N=5,566) using a case where the EPA endorsed antibiotic spraying on citrus crops during both Trump’s and Biden’s presidencies. Holding science constant, out-group oversight reduces support for spraying by 26%, lowers trust in EPA’s evaluation, and increases donations to an opposing NGO by 15%. In an obfuscated follow-up, citrus demand is unchanged, but effects differ by consumption habits.
"Disappointment, Populism, and Unrelated Beliefs"