Research

[Available upon request] This paper addresses an overlooked paradox: how processes of social revitalization can undermine local civic life. While connectivity and globalization generate dynamic spaces through economic activity, they may also displace rooted social interactions that sustain political participation. I draw on a quasi-natural experiment—the transformation of the Way of Saint James (Camino de Santiago) into a major tourist route—to examine how the influx of visitors and newcomers affects community engagement. I find a decline in civic participation: association density drops by 16% of the sample mean, and local turnout decreases by 1.77 percentage points. Two mechanisms appear to drive this decline: (a) congestion, as hostels concentrate in town centers, displacing traditional social hubs; and (b) compositional change, with a younger, mobile population less inclined to engage. Additional housing and demographic data support this interpretation. As social spaces become crowded, the conditions that once supported cooperation—stable, repeated interactions—begin to erode.

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In the aftermath of globalization, Western democracies have witnessed a surge in political disaffection and radical-right support. While economic and migration shocks have been widely studied, the political effects of border liberalization remain underexplored. This paper theorizes and tests how increased border permeability can generate political discontent, even without necessarily affecting immigration or direct economic competition. We argue that open borders enable brief, routine interactions between groups across historically closed frontiers. When this occurs between regions of unequal perceived status, it can erode symbolic boundaries and foster resentment. We examine this in the context of the German–Czech border, which transformed from a militarized Cold War frontier to an internal EU border. Leveraging two moments of liberalization—the fall of the Iron Curtain (1989) and Czech EU accession (2004)—we apply difference-in-differences and event study designs using municipality-level data from Bavaria. Border liberalization led to a drop in turnout (≈ 2 pp) and a rise in radical-right support (≈ 1 pp). These findings have implications for the determinants of backlash against globalization.

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How do early voting experiences under adverse political contexts shape long-term partisan attachments? This paper argues that elections held during periods of poor government performance can leave a durable anti-incumbent imprint on first-time voters. Combining the impressionable years hypothesis with theories of economic voting, I theorize that retrospective evaluations at the moment of first eligibility act as learning cues that crystallize into lasting political preferences. Using data from the European Social Survey, cabinet-level information from ParlGov, and macroeconomic indicators from the World Bank, I link respondents to the economic conditions of their first eligible election. Results show that individuals exposed to high unemployment during this period are significantly less likely to vote for, identify with, or align ideologically with the incumbent party later in life. The findings suggest that political learning through elections may encode long-term partisan distancing.

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More than two million evictions occur in the US annually, with profound and lasting consequences for the families and communities affected. This paper examines how the closure of brick-and-mortar bank branches in the US affected the number of households threatened with evictions from 2000–2018. To overcome the potential endogeneity associated with branch closures, we adopt an instrumental variable (IV) identification strategy that uses bank mergers as an instrument for the distance between the population and bank branches at the census tract level. Our results show that interstate and intercounty mergers positively and significantly affected the distance to the closest bank branches. Moreover, we find that a 1% increase in the distance to the closest branch generated a 2.3% increase in the number of households threatened with eviction. The effects in urban tracts primarily drive this result. We complement our analysis with several robustness checks, including a matching procedure to control for pre-existing observable differences between tracts exposed and unexposed to mergers. Moreover, we re-estimate our model focusing on mergers where the acquiring and the acquired banks had overlapping branches within the same tract, and we consider different measures of financial exclusion and exposure to evictions.

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