Projects

Published Articles

Voter Turnout and Selective Abstention in Concurrent Votes

joint paper with Reto Foellmi, and Lukas Schmid. Forthcoming Political Science Research and Methods

This paper studies voter turnout and selective abstention on voting days with more than one election or referendum. We extend the rational choice model to a setting with multiple concurrent votes. The model is based on a voter’s net benefit, which includes a vote’s salience and information costs. It explains how the net benefit of different concurrent votes enters a voter’s utility function and thereby affects turnout and selective abstention, the tendency to vote in one but not all votes held on the same day. We test our theoretical predictions using data on concurrent propositions in Switzerland from 1988 to 2016. Our results suggest that the proposition with the highest net benefit and the sum of the net benefits of all concurrent propositions are relevant determinants of the individual turnout decision. We also find that a proposition’s net benefit explains variation in selective abstention.

Do Voting Advice Applications Change Political Behavior?

joint paper with Christine Benesch, Mark Schelker, and Lukas Schmid. (2023) 85(2) Journal of Politics.

We analyze how the introduction of the voting advice application smartvote in Switzerland affects voter turnout, voting behavior, and electoral outcomes. The Swiss context offers an ideal setting to identify the causal effects of voting advice applications using real-world aggregate data because smartvote was introduced in different cantons at different points in time. We find that smartvote does not affect turnout but that voters more actively select candidates instead of parties by splitting their ballot. Our findings suggest that no specific party seems to benefit from the change in voting behavior.

Working Papers

Information and the Demand for Political Candidates

This paper analyzes how the introduction of the voting advice application (VAA) smartvote affects the representation of women in parliament. Switzerland offers an optimal setting to identify the causal effect of voting advice applications as the introduction of smartvote was staggered at the cantonal level. The results show that personalized voting recommendations provided by smartvote increase the share of women in parliament, as they receive relatively more votes than men. This increase in women's representation is associated with higher education spending, but not with changes in social security expenditures. Analyzing the mechanisms reveals that female politicians are recommended at higher rates by smartvote because they are less likely to adopt extreme positions when answering the questionnaire compared to male candidates, and the VAA systematically favors this response pattern. These results underscore that VAAs are not merely informational tools but can embed systematic biases, raising important questions about their reliability in democratic processes.

Information_and_Demand_for_Political_Candidates (9).pdf

Simultaneous Elections and Referendums: Who Benefits?

The literature has revealed that concurrently holding elections is an effective practice to increase political participation. However, it may also affect electoral outcomes and voting behavior. In this article, I exploit a quasi-experiment from Switzerland in which some cantonal parliamentary elections were held concurrently with referendums at the federal level. Analyzing 368 cantonal parliamentary elections with a proportional representation between 1951 and 2022 shows that holding concurrent referendums increases election turnout by a substantial margin. The magnitude of this effect depends on the difference in turnout rates between the elections and referendums. Further results indicate that voters from the whole political spectrum are equally mobilized and do not rely on the well-known incumbents but on party cues as a decision shortcut. Robustness tests support a causal interpretation of the main results.

Elections_and_Referendums.pdf

Direct Democracy and State Government Finances

joint paper with Benedikt Marxer.

This paper examines the causal impact of citizen-initiated ballot measures, defined as initiatives and veto referendums, on state government revenues and expenditures. Across U.S. states, direct democratic institutions have been introduced at different points in time, creating a setting that allows for causal identification. Leveraging a newly compiled panel dataset spanning from 1890–2008 with detailed contextual information, we apply a partially pooled synthetic control method that constructs counterfactuals based on both within-state and cross-state pre-treatment imbalances. The results indicate that the adoption of citizen-initiated ballot measures has no significant effect on state fiscal outcomes. We further show that signature requirements for launching ballot measures are uncorrelated with their actual frequency, helping to explain why we do not find a difference between direct and indirect fiscal effects. The findings are robust across model specifications and institutional contexts. This research offers new insights into the fiscal implications of citizen-initiated legislation.

3_Direct_Democracy (1).pdf

What Drives Voter Bias Against Muslim Politicians? An Experimental Examination

joint paper with Henning Finseraas.

Religious and ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in political office, but its reason is debated. Using administrative data from Norwegian local elections (2003–2023), we show that Muslim candidates receive fewer personal votes than non-Muslim candidates. To identify the mechanisms behind this gap, we implement a forced-choice conjoint experiment that allows us to identify stereotype-driven discrimination due to a lack of candidate information. In a low-information setting, respondents exhibit a substantial anti-Muslim bias. We then systematically introduce attributes that capture political stereotypes that we identified in a separate study. Providing stereotype-relevant information reduces the anti-Muslim penalty by 2–5 percentage points, with the largest reduction occurring when respondents learn candidates’ positions on minority-rights issues. These findings highlight the importance of providing politically relevant information to voters, which can substantially reduce voter bias.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse