We study how the introduction of female suffrage affects political competition measured by the incumbency advantage. We link these phenomena through risk attitudes. We argue that the introduction of female suffrage might have increased risk aversion among the electorate. We study the staggered introduction of female suffrage in elections to cantonal parliaments in Switzerland. We use a regression discontinuity design to estimate incumbency effects and rely on a new measure of electoral closeness for proportional elections to construct our running variable. To identify causal effects, we combine regression discontinuity with differences-in-difference assumptions and implement a difference-in-discontinuity design. We document that the introduction of female suffrage had no systematic effect on the aggregate incumbency advantage of roughly 45 percentage points. However, we uncover that female incumbents tend to benefit from a 16.8 percentage-points higher incumbency advantage compared to men. We find no significant effects on party-specific incumbency advantages.

A key debate regarding British political development concerns the timing of the shift from a candidate-oriented electorate towards a party-oriented electorate. We study this evolution using individual-level registers of vote choices predating the Secret Ballot that cover around 90,000 vote choices in 21 English constituencies and span the years 1832-1868. We document strong persistence in vote choices: throughout the sample period, there were large groups of voters who remained loyal to Conservatives or Liberals between two consecutive elections. Yet, about one fourth of voters in our data change their vote choice. We find that this is more likely among voters who voted for an exiting candidate in the previous election than among those voters whose candidates re-ran. The effect of candidate exit on vote switching declines towards the end of our sample period, suggesting that voter alignment with parties was ultimately a process that was on-going throughout the mid-1800s.

This study examines the voting patterns of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi in ten general elections held since the early 2000s in rural and urban areas in Israel, utilizing a new classification method of origin of immigrants and their descendants based on surnames alongside the traditional classification by continent of birth. The study reveals relatively sharp fluctuations across elections in the size of origin gap in voting for right-wing party bloc between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi. According to the empirical analysis, the origin voting gap in the general elections held in 2022 was five times the gap found in the elections held in 2006, and more than twice that of the elections held in 2009. Sharp fluctuations in the voting gap undermine the protest vote hypothesis that discrimination against immigrants of Mizrahi origin in the past is the main factor behind their current political behavior.

Using a large randomized controlled trial and rich individual-level data on eligible voters and their household members, we evaluate how get-out-the-vote appeals affect inequalities in voting, transmit from treated to untreated individuals within households, and how the transmission of voting decisions through family networks influences inequalities in voting. We find that receiving a text message reminder before the Finnish county elections in 2022 mobilized mainly low-propensity voters, and thereby reduced existing inequalities in voting within the target group of young voters. We remarkably find that over 100 percent of the direct treatment effect spilled over to untreated household members. These spillovers reduced inequality also in voting among the older voters that were not part of the target group. Overall, our results exemplify how randomized controlled trials with a limited focus on the analysis of individuals in the treatment and control groups may lead to misestimating the compositional effects of get-out-the-vote interventions.