European Journal of Political Economy最新文献

Despite ongoing efforts to bridge gender disparities, women continue to be underrepresented in political spheres. This paper proposes a novel explanation for the female disadvantage in electoral success, focusing on politicians’ capacity to broaden their electoral base and appeal to voters from opposing parties. Drawing on Swiss elections, this paper leverages various aspects of the electoral system. In Switzerland, the electoral process is characterized by open lists, allowing voters to select candidates within their preferred party, and cross-voting, enabling them to choose candidates from other party lists. Additionally, electoral registers provide data on the number of preference votes garnered by each candidate, categorized by the voter’s preferred party. The analysis reveals that individual preference votes play a pivotal role in driving gender disparities in candidates’ electoral achievements. While the gender gap in preferences expressed by supporters of a particular party is less robust, male politicians outperform their female counterparts significantly in collecting preference votes through cross-voting. This implies that male politicians are more skilled at persuading voters from rival parties. These findings, motivated by various underlying mechanisms, carry considerable policy implications concerning the approach to addressing gender inequalities in politics.

A sizeable literature analyses how immigration affects attitudes towards migrants and discusses differences between socio-economic groups and their potential correlation with perceived concerns about labour market competition. Against the background of the large-scale influx of refugees into Germany between 2015 and 2016, this paper uses data from a unique and representative survey of the German population to assess whether respondents express fears of job loss due to immigration. We focus on the importance of perceptions of migrants' ability to do one's job in relation to these fears. Moreover, we compare concerns about refugees with those about EU migrants and propose several hypotheses. Our findings indicate that: (i) Respondents are more likely to view EU migrants as potential competitors in the labour market. (ii) Workers in blue-collar occupations and without tertiary education are more likely to view migrants as potential competitors on the labour market. (iii) The perception of potential competition from migrants strongly predicts fear of job loss. Once we control for this perception, occupation and skill levels are no longer significantly related to the probability of reporting fear of job loss. Moreover, there are no longer significant differences between the two migrant groups. (iv) Anti-migrant sentiments are also associated with concerns about job loss.

Millions of people were forced to flee Ukraine after Russia's invasion on February 24, 2022, one of the fastest displacements in decades. Citizens' response in EU countries (where most displaced Ukrainians arrived) has been considerably more positive than in past refugee crises. This study investigates several possible drivers of this difference. We conduct a large conjoint experiment in six EU Member States, eliciting willingness to provide temporary protection to hypothetical groups of future migrants whose characteristics we manipulate systematically. We find that all of the experimental variables make a difference. We observe a greater support for protecting groups consisting of relatively many children and many women rather than men. The region of origin and the religious affiliation play a major role. Finally, we see greater support for people fleeing a war rather than poverty or the adverse consequences of climate change. While all these effects are identified consistently across different groups of respondents (e.g., the respondent's religion played a limited role), effect sizes vary considerably between countries. Finally, we randomly manipulate which aspect of temporary protection (social housing, access to the labour market) is emphasised in our communication to the participants. We find this manipulation to have a limited effect on the public support for the policy.

Considering self-inflicted critical events (suicides, attempted suicides, self-harm acts, hunger strikes) in Italian prisons as indicators of the respect of inmates' human rights, this study examines their relationship with the characteristics of the Italian prison system between 2016 and 2021, using a unique prison-level dataset covering the 188 national prisons. Both individual panel regressions and seemingly unrelated regressions show that reducing prison overcrowding reduces critical events. The same result is achieved by increasing mandatory treatments (restraint acts) performed discretionally by prison staff. Because the former policy is politically sensitive and difficult/costly to implement, policymakers may prefer to rely on the latter as a “death-avoidance strategy”, despite the greater likelihood of violating inmates’ human rights. These findings may help explain the increasing use of acts of restraint in Italian prisons in recent times.

We study the consequences of politically induced asset-market uncertainty. Our data are from Poland, where the imposition of a new resource tax was vaguely announced in a single sentence by the prime minister in November 2011. The tax concerned a single company, one of the world's leading copper and silver producers. We show how the announcement, besides imposing losses as expected on shareholders, introduced uncertainty into asset-market valuation.

Using the measures proposed by Mink et al. (2012), we reexamine the coherence of business cycles in the euro area using a long sample period. We also analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business cycle coherence and examine whether our measures for business cycle coherence indicate a core versus periphery within EMU. Our results suggest that business cycle coherence did not increase monotonically. The COVID-19 pandemic made that the signs of the output gaps of euro area countries became more similar, but we find large differences in the amplitude of the output gaps across countries.

We conducted two fundraising experiments to study the effects (1) of compassion towards the beneficiary, and (2) of giving participants an opportunity to attribute small donations to luck. We find that exposing the participants to a plea to help the beneficiary increases the average donation. Giving participants an opportunity to attribute small donations to luck decreases the average donation. We find that in our setting, the latter effect dominates.

Over the past 20 years, per-student spending on compulsory education in Switzerland has risen by 52 percent in real terms. However, per-pupil expenditures vary significantly across cantons. The question quickly arises whether “more is always better”. Switzerland lends itself to this analysis because spending authority lies with the cantons and thus provides a good setting for a within-country analysis. We use a new comprehensive dataset to measure educational quality and mobility at the individual level. Our analysis shows that higher cantonal spending does not increase educational quality or mobility. The allocation of education spending seems to be more important than its mere amount. For example, our study suggests a better linguistic integration of foreign-speaking students.