Working papers
This note asks why parties can appear more polarized than voters. It develops a simple dynamic model of electoral competition in which some voters are impressionable and adjust their preferences to past party positions. The anticipation of this influence creates intertemporal trade-offs for parties, which may ultimately lead to polarization. The framework delivers well-defined equilibria and shows how forward-looking incentives can sustain party polarization even in an initially homogeneous electorate.
Polarization for Exploration, with Gema Lax-Martínez
Party polarization may yield new insights into voter preferences by directing attention to specific issues. We investigate theoretically and empirically the relationship between party polarization and party learning. In our two-period model, parties are initially uncertain about voter preferences but acquire information if they polarize. This framework reveals a novel polarizing force: parties’ exploration incentives. Under certain conditions, a party polarizes only to learn the true state of public opinion, thus enabling more informed future decisions. To illustrate these mechanisms, we examine the Spanish abortion debate. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design, we identify shifts in the tone of politicians’ tweets driven by rising public attention to abortion, which itself stems from prior party polarization. We further calibrate our model using Spanish survey data to assess whether polarization was driven solely by exploration incentives.
The Timing of Pledges in Electoral Campaigns, with Anke Gerber
We study parties’ dynamic behavior in electoral campaigns when the order of moves is endogenous. We consider two ideology- and office- motivated parties who sequentially make policy announcements on two political issues. No order of moves is imposed: each party can take any available action after any history, and elections occur once no party chooses to act further. Crucially, parties’ incentives are shaped by the endogenous timing, allowing us to treat the ordering of parties’ announcement as a strategic variable and to study voters whose preferences depend on it. Our results provide new insights into the role of sequencing in electoral competition and into parties’ strategies in multi-issue environments.
Networks and Political Participation after Conflict, with Gema Lax-Martínez and Carlos Victoria-Lanzón
This paper builds on the network model of Galeotti et al (2010) to examine how the destruction of local infrastructure shapes social capital. In the model, voting is a coordination game with strategic complementarities, implying that denser social networks foster higher turnout. We test these predictions in the context of the 1937 attack on civilians during the Spanish Civil War, which destroyed a major coastal road and isolated nearby towns. Using proximity to the bombed road—instrumented by distance to deep water, ruggedness, and elevation, as suggested by witness reports—we show that the most affected towns subsequently displayed higher electoral participation forty years later. Ruling out alternative channels linked to economic development, we show—consistent with the model— that the effect operates through tighter social networks, with isolation emerging as the key mechanism sustaining long-term civic engagement.
Work in Progress
Strategic Choices of Political Leaders (Theory + Data)
Identifying Feedback Effects in the Lab (Experiment)
The Evolution of Moral Issues (Comparative politics)