Fiscal rules, or constraints on the policymaking discretion of elected officials, are widely used to regulate fiscal policies. Using data on Italian municipalities, we employ a difference-in-discontinuity design to provide evidence of the negative effect of fiscal rules on mayoral candidates’ education. Municipalities in which fiscal rules meaningfully restrict the action space of politicians drive the effect. These results are consistent with a formal model of fiscal rules and political selection. We highlight that reducing discretion may affect the composition of the pool of players: it may alleviate pork-barrel spending but also negatively affect the education of politicians.

We study whether a better knowledge of the functioning of pay-as-you-go pension systems and recent demographic trends in the hosting country affects natives’ attitudes towards immigration. In two online experiments in Italy and Spain, we randomly treated participants with a video explaining how, in pay-as-you-go pension systems, the payment of current pensions depends on the contributions paid by current workers. The video also explains that the ratio between the number of pensioners and the number of workers in their countries will grow substantially in the future. We find that the treatment improves participants’ knowledge about how a pay-as-you-go system works and the future demographic trends in their country. However, we find that only treated participants who support non-populist parties display more positive attitudes towards migrants, even though the treatment increases knowledge of pension systems and demographic trends for all participants.

We study the effect of economic insecurity on electoral outcomes using data on municipal elections in Italy. We implement a difference-in-differences approach that exploits exogenous variation across municipalities in the share of inactive workers due to the economic lockdown introduced by the central government to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that lockdown-induced economic insecurity positively affected the electoral performance of progressive and left-wing parties, while it negatively affected conservative and far-right parties. Conversely, we find no effect for the populist Five Star Movement, local independent parties (i.e., Civic Lists), and electoral turnout. We provide evidence that extraordinary economic measures introduced by the central government to compensate workers for the economic insecurity can explain this shift in partisanship toward the left and the increasing support for pro-EU parties, away from euro-skeptic and populist forces.

We use data from Italy to study the political and social impact of a refugee reception policy (SPRAR) directly managed by local governments, whose features recall the conditions of the contact theory (Allport, 1954). Instrumental variables estimates indicate that municipalities that opened a refugee center between the 2013 and 2018 national elections experienced a change in the vote shares of extreme-right parties approximately 7 percentage points lower compared to towns that did not open a refugee center. We document that the positive impact of SPRARs on “compositional amenities” (i.e., local schools) and population growth allows explaining the negative impact on anti-immigrants’ prejudice. Finally, we provide evidence of spillovers in prejudice reduction in neighboring municipalities without a SPRAR.

Do electoral incentives affect immigration policies? Exploiting the Italian system for refugees’ reception and data from Italian municipalities, we show that proximity to elections reduces the probability that a municipality applies to host a refugee center by 26%, despite the economic benefits arising from these centers. Low electoral competition and high shares of extreme-right voters drive the effect. Our results are rationalized by a theoretical model and can explain the unequal distribution of refugees across and within countries.

Large migrant inflows have spurred anti-immigrant sentiment, but can small inflows have a different impact? We exploit the redistribution of migrants after the dismantling of the "Calais Jungle" in France to study the impact of the exposure to few migrants, which we estimate using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables. We find that in the presence of a migrant center (CAO), the growth rate of vote shares for the main far-right party (Front National (FN), our proxy for antiimmigrant sentiment) between 2012 and 2017 is reduced by about 12 percentage points. This effect, which crucially depends on the inflow’s size, points towards the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954).

We provide a theoretical and empirical assessment of why local fiscal autonomy can affect the skills of elected officials in sub-national governments. We first develop a model of politics with different types of politicians and show that -- following a tax decentralization reform increasing local fiscal autonomy -- politicians with high administrative skills are elected in rich jurisdictions while politicians with high political skills are elected in poor ones. As a result, voter welfare increases only, or mainly, in rich jurisdictions. We then look for empirical support to these predictions by exploiting the decentralization reforms affecting Italian municipalities in the '90s. These reforms introduced both the direct election of the mayor and new autonomous tax tools for municipalities characterized by large differences in their tax bases. Our estimates -- robust to several alternative stories -- emphasize a differential change in elected officials at the municipal level between rich and poor jurisdictions. These findings provide a new explanation for the observed poor performance of local governments largely financed by grants.

Recently several countries have experienced a drop in popularity of national political parties, accompanied by the success of independent movements (e.g. “Civic Lists” in Italy). I exploit the success of “Civic Lists” in Italian municipalities and use them as a comparison group for party-affiliated politicians, to test whether national parties affect fiscal discipline. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD), I show that party-affiliated mayors are more fiscally responsible: they run lower deficits, accumulate less debt and reduce expenditures. The effect is significant only for municipalities not constrained by fiscal rules. This suggests that national parties act as a substitute for fiscal rules in constraining politicians. Besides, I provide evidence that the discipline of party-affiliated politicians is linked to better career prospects: party-affiliated mayors have a higher probability of being re-elected and better chances of being promoted to higher levels of government. Alternative stories find less support in the data.

We show that polities using plurality rule to elect their policymakers are more likely to adopt more restrictive immigration policies than those using dual-ballot systems. Plurality rule provides stronger incentives for right-wing, anti-immigrant parties to run alone, as opposed to joining a coalition with other right-wing parties that offer a less restrictive immigration policy. We prove the result theoretically and empirically. Our theoretical results hold with sincere and strategic voters, with and without endogenous turnout, and can be extended to the comparison between plurality rule and proportional representation without majority bonuses in parliamentary elections. Empirically, we combine municipal-level data on migration-related expenditures and mayoral elections and establish causality using a regression discontinuity design.

This paper investigates how connections between politics and firms influence the profiles of political candidates and their policy decisions. We focus on antirevolving door laws, which impose a mandatory “cooling-off” period before former politicians can take significant positions in the bureaucracy or in specific firms. We develop a political agency model where politicians can access “politically connected outside options” (PCOs). A decline in the value of PCOs disproportionately affects individuals with lower human capital, increasing the proportion of high human capital candidates, but heightens the likelihood that low human capital politicians pander to voters, choosing popular but not necessarily optimal policies. We test these predictions using data from Italian municipalities, leveraging a population threshold that triggers anti-revolving door policies in a difference-in-discontinuity design. The cooling-off period raises the education of candidates and elected mayors, and increases the probability that low human capital mayors reduce local taxes while worsening bureaucratic quality.

Renewable energy enjoys broad support, yet wind farms provoke local opposition and the governments that approve them can suffer at the polls. Who bears that cost is unclear when a regional government approves each project and a municipality hosts it. We develop a framework in which voters attribute responsibility across le-vels of government, and the region, anticipating their response, chooses where to build. Using administrative records on every Spanish wind project and the seven municipal elections between 1995 and 2019, we find that voters hold the region res-ponsible: an authorization costs the regional incumbent votes whatever the mayor's party, and it is the authorization that moves the vote, not the announcement or the construction of the project. Alignment changes is the mayor's fate, since a mayor of the region's party loses support and a mayor of the opposition gains it. The region takes this into account, announcing more projects in municipalities that become un-aligned. We also find that, in unaligned municipalities, the authorization arrives la-ter, but the project is no less likely to be built. We conclude that voters in a multilevel system can assign responsibility sharply to the tier that decides, and that this attri-bution shapes where projects are built.

Does electing a female political leader fuel a far-right backlash? Using a regression discontinuity design on close mixed-gender mayoral races in Italian municipalities, we find that electing a female mayor raises the vote share of Lega - Italy's main populist radical right party - by 2.0 percentage points at the next general election, nearly doubling the average change. To investigate the mechanisms, we construct novel municipal-level indices of masculinity norms and gender norms, and show that the reaction is concentrated where dominance-oriented masculinity norms are stronger and is further amplified by local economic insecurity, while exhibiting no clear gradient along gender norms. This pattern is consistent with a status-threat mechanism. The results provide causal evidence that advances in women's political leadership generate a far-right electoral backlash, and identify dominance-oriented masculinity - rather than gender norms per se - as the cultural margin along which it operates.

Why is anti-immigrant voting high where immigrants are scarce? Using municipal data from Lombardy, we document a U-shaped relationship between immigrant presence and the vote share of Lega Nord, the region’s main anti-immigration party in 2013. We identify an electoral breakpoint at an immigrant share of 3.35%: the party’s vote share is about 6 percentage points higher immediately below the threshold. We show that this break coincides with a shift from small, weakly specialized labor markets, where natives and immigrants compete for similar jobs, to larger urban markets characterized by occupational differentiation. The native–immigrant income gap absorbs approximately half of the electoral break, while the main observable alternatives do not. A simple model shows how an immigration threshold can activate native skill upgrading, transforming labor-market competition into complementarity and reducing support for anti-immigrant parties.