Behavioral Foundations of Populism and Polarization

In this page I summarize the scientific output and dissemination activity for my ERC Starting Grant, no. 852526, on "Behavioral Foundations of Populism and Polarization" (POPULIZATION). This grant will be active until July 2025.

Objectives

Since the Great Recession of 2008, populist parties have scored major electoral successes around Europe. Nonetheless, the populist map of Europe has mixed colors: in some countries, voters rally behind right-wing parties promising closed borders while, in others, resentment towards rising inequality has fuelled left-wing movements; some other countries have been less susceptible to populist rhetoric. Why are populist parties more successful in some places (or times) compared to others? What makes right or left populism more prominent in some countries (or after certain crises)? This project tackles these questions with the tools of behavioral political economy, a blossoming field at the intersection of behavioral economics and political economy, which applies insights from cognitive psychology and methodologies from microeconomics to understand political behavior. I will address two fundamental issues that can shed light on the puzzling pattern of support for populism: the heterogeneity and time (in)stability of preferences and cognitive abilities; and the role of limited attention in shaping preferences and information processing. The combined output of these projects will greatly improve our understanding of European citizens' political preferences and how they affect economic and political outcomes.

Published Papers

• A Model of Focusing in Political Choice, with Jan Zapal, Journal of Politics, Forthcoming, Abstract

  This paper develops a model of voters' and politicians' behavior based on the notion that voters focus disproportionately on and, hence, overweigh the policies in which politicians' platforms differ more. We introduce focusing in a model of electoral competition between differentiated candidates who invest resources to improve the quality of their policies in multiple common value issues. We show that voters' attention distortion leads to greater investment in policy development, greater platform differentiation (with politicians standing out in the policies they are more competent in), and greater investment in divisive policies. Finally, we show that focusing can contribute to explain puzzling stylized facts such as the entry of single-issue parties with no electoral chances or the inverse correlation between income inequality and redistribution.

• Positive Spillovers from Negative Campaigning, with Vincenzo Galasso and Tommaso Nannicini, American Journal of Political Science, 2023, 67(1): 5–21, Online Appendix, Replication Data, Media: La Nación, Abstract

  Negative advertising is frequent in electoral campaigns, despite its ambiguous effectiveness: negativity may reduce voters’ evaluation of the targeted politician but have a backlash effect for the attacker. We study the effect of negative advertising in electoral races with more than two candidates with a large scale field experiment during an electoral campaign for mayor in Italy and a survey experiment in a fictitious mayoral campaign. In our field experiment, we find a strong, positive spillover effect on the third main candidate (neither the target nor the attacker). This effect is confirmed in our survey experiment, which creates a controlled environment with no ideological components nor strategic voting. The negative ad has no impact on the targeted incumbent, has a sizable backlash effect on the attacker, and largely benefits the idle candidate. The attacker is perceived as less cooperative, less likely to lead a successful government, and more ideologically extreme.

• Declared Support and Clientelism, with Simeon Nichter, Comparative Political Studies, 2022, 55(13): 2178–2216, Supplementary Information, Replication Data, Abstract

  Recent studies of clientelism predominantly focus on how elites use rewards to influence vote choices and turnout. This article shifts attention towards citizens and their choices beyond the ballot box. Under what conditions does clientelism influence citizens’ decisions to express political preferences publicly? When voters can obtain post-election benefits by declaring support for victorious candidates, their choices to display political paraphernalia on their homes or bodies may reflect more than just political preferences. We argue that various factors — such as the size of rewards and punishments, the competitiveness of the election, and whether multiple candidates employ clientelism — affect citizens’ propensity to declare support in response to clientelist inducements. Building on insights from fieldwork, formal analyses reveal how and why such factors can distort patterns of political expression observed dur- ing electoral campaigns. We conduct an experiment in Brazil, which predominantly corroborates predictions about declared support and clientelism.

• Dynamic Legislative Bargaining with Veto Power: Theory and Experiments, Games and Economic Behavior, 2021, 126: 186–230, Abstract

  In many domains, committees bargain over a sequence of policies and a policy remains in effect until a new agreement is reached. In this paper, I argue that, in order to assess the consequences of veto power, it is important to take into account this dynamic aspect. I analyze an infinitely repeated divide-the-dollar game with an endogenous status quo policy. I show that full appropriation by the veto player is the only stable policy when legislators are sufficiently impatient; and that, irrespective of legislators’ patience and the initial division of resources, there is always an equilibrium where policy eventually gets arbitrarily close to full appropriation by the veto player. In this equilibrium, increasing legislators’ patience or decreasing the veto player’s ability to set the agenda makes convergence to this outcome slower and the veto player supports reforms that decrease his allocation. The main predictions of the theory find support in controlled laboratory experiments.

Working Papers and Work in Progress

• Meta-Analysis of Distributional Preferences Estimates, with Massimiliano Pozzi, Abstract
  Revise and Resubmit at Economic Journal

  We conduct a large-scale interdisciplinary meta-analysis to aggregate the knowledge from empirical estimates of distributional preferences reported from 1999 to 2022. In particular, we examine 289 estimates of sensitivity to inequality from 40 articles in economics, psychology, neuroscience and computer science which structurally estimate the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) model. Our analysis indicates that individuals are inequality averse: mean sensitivity to disadvantageous inequality is 0.467 with a 95% probability that the true value lies in the interval [0.302, 0.642]; mean sensitivity to advantageous inequality is 0.331 with a 95% probability that the true value lies in the interval [0.266, 0.396]. We observe high levels of heterogeneity, both across studies and across individuals, with estimated parameters sensitive to some features of the study design (namely, the experimental task and the subject population). Finally, we do not find compelling evidence of selective reporting or publication bias.

• Audi Alteram Partem: An Experiment on Selective Exposure to Information, with Giovanni Montanari, Abstract
  Revise and Resubmit at Journal of the Economic Science Association

  We report the results of an experiment on selective exposure to information. A decision maker interested in learning about an uncertain state of the world can acquire information from one of two sources which have opposite biases: when informed on the state, they report it truthfully; when uninformed, they report their favorite state. A Bayesian decision maker is better off seeking confirmatory information unless the source biased against the prior is sufficiently more reliable. In line with the theory, subjects are more likely to seek confirmatory information when sources are symmetrically reliable. On the other hand, when sources are asymmetrically reliable, subjects are more likely to consult the more reliable source even when prior beliefs are strongly unbalanced and this source is less informative. Our experiment suggests that base rate neglect and simple heuristics (e.g., listen to the most reliable source) are important drivers of the endogenous acquisition of information.

• Cognitive Abilities and the Demand for Bad Policy, with Eugenio Proto and Aldo Rustichini, Abstract, Pre-Registration

  Rational choice theories of voting are predicated on the assumption that citizens accurately assess the comparative advantages of different policy options. However, many policies produce outcomes through indirect or equilibrium effects, such as lifting the minimum wage, expanding or constructing roads, implementing Pigouvian taxes, and reducing fiscal deficits. The average citizen might not fully appreciate these equilibrium effects, leading to misjudgments about the efficacy of certain policies; this ability may be related to education and cognitive abilities. Recent research by Dal Bo, Dal Bo, and Eyster (2018) demonstrates that individuals often vote against policies that, despite imposing direct costs, would resolve social dilemmas and enhance overall welfare. This raises an important research question: Do education and cognitive abilities influence preference formation regarding policies? And if they do, what is the underlying mechanism? Our study proposes a simple theoretical framework and an experimental approach to explore a potential pathway and shows that enhanced cognitive abilities may lead to a better choice of untested policies. An additional crucial element is beliefs about the cognitive abilities of the other voters.

• Reciprocity and Democratic Accountability, with Benjamin Blumenthal, Abstract

  This paper introduces reciprocity in a model of political agency. Voters are uncertain about politicians' competence and, after observing a policy outcome which depends both on the incumbent's competence and on her effort, must decide whether to re-elect the incumbent or replace her with a challenger. I assume voters are both forward-looking — that is, interested in selecting competent politicians — and retrospective — that is, have a preference for rewarding kind actions and punishing unkind actions; and I investigate how this affects the behavior of incumbent politicians who seek re-election. I show that reciprocity increases democratic accountability — that is, it provides better incentives for politicians to take costly effort — if and only if voters are sufficiently informed on the incumbent's effort and moderately reciprocal. Moreover, I show that keeping voters' reciprocity into account can overturn results from standard models of electoral accountability and has important normative implications: increasing the degree of voters' information about the incumbent's effort and reducing the benefits from office improves effective accountability if and only if voters are sufficiently reciprocal.