Embedded Files
The Electoral Effects of State-Sponsored Homophobia
(co-authored with Violeta Haas, Tarik Abou-Chadi, Heike Klüver and Lukas Stoetzer)
Do strategies of state-sponsored homophobia translate into electoral gains? While a growing body of literature documents the increasing politicization of LGBTQ- and gender-related issues by illiberal elites, little is known about the electoral effects of these strategies. We address this important question by studying whether anti-LGBTQ mobilization pays off electorally for government parties. Empirically, we study the adoption of anti-LGBTQ resolutions in many Polish municipalities prior to the 2019 parliamentary election. Using a synthetic difference-in-differences design, we find that these resolutions significantly depressed turnout in affected municipalities, with opposition parties showing less mobilization capacity. By contrast, turnout for the incumbent Law and Justice Party increased substantially. Overall, this study's findings are relevant for understanding the electoral consequences of both elite-led mobilization against stigmatized and discriminated groups, and policies of subnational democratic backsliding.
Presented by the authors at the 2023 MPSA, EPSA, EPOP, SISP and the 2024 SPSA and MPSA conferences, the EuroWEPS workshop at Oxford and seminars at Bocconi and Princeton.
Immigration and Far-Right Government Support
How do citizens evaluate far-right governments in office? I conduct a survey experiment to study how immigration affects the support for a far-right government. The experiment, embedded in a representative survey of 2055 individuals in Italy, exposes different respondent groups to information regarding the government’s pledges and outcomes in immigration and economic growth. Drawing upon the literature, I find evidence that under the far right in office, citizens react negatively to non-attainment of pledged immigration outcomes. No heterogeneous treatment effects w.r.t. political views are evident, as the effect is neither more nor less pronounced among those who consider immigration important, people with left, right or far-right attitudes and among far-right party voters. By examining the dynamics between policy pledges, outcomes, and voter responses, this research sheds light on the evaluation of far-right governments by the electorate.
The research has been approved by the Ethics Committee of Bocconi University and pre-registered on OSF.
Presented at Bocconi University and NYU's Rebecca Morton Conference on Experimental Political Science.
Synthetic Control Methods for Proportions
(co-authored with Lukas Stoetzer)
Synthetic control methods are widely used for causal inference in case studies and panel data settings, often applied to model counterfactuals for proportional outcomes. However, conventional synthetic control methods are designed for univariate outcomes, leading researchers to model counterfactuals for each proportion separately. We propose an extension to synthetic control methods to simultaneously handle multivariate outcomes in compositional data. Our approach establishes constant control comparisons by using the same weights for each proportion, improving comparability while adhering to treatment constraints. We illustrate the benefits of our method through a simulation and an empirical application to a recent study on climate policy effects in the 2019 Spanish general election. This advancement extends the validity and reliability of synthetic control estimates to common outcomes in political science.
Presented at Bocconi University, EPSA 2024 and PolMeth 2024.
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