Research

[AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST] Tourism is generally praised for revitalizing local economies, yet it can also carry subtle political costs. In this article, I argue that contexts of persistent mobility, where social encounters are frequent but ephemeral, weaken the incentives to invest and to enforce local participation. I examine the case of the Way of Saint James (Camino de Santiago) in Spain, where a tourist boom transformed social life in small urban and rural communities. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I show that tourist exposure reduced association density by roughly 17-24 percent of the sample mean and local turnout by more than 2 percentage points. Communities that host pilgrims face a contextual and compositional shock. First, hostels tend to be located near town halls, disrupting existing social routines at these fixed places. Second, hostels attract younger, mobile residents who join the community and have less engagement in local affairs. Both effects changed the norms that enforce local participation.

Download PDF

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.

Download PDF

[AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST] The literature of democratic accountability has studied economic voting as a short-term electoral behavior: voters punish incumbents for poor economic performance and then move on. This article argues that, for newly enfranchised voters, such retrospective evaluations can permeate into partisan attachments. I argue that high unemployment during an individual’s first election provides a salient cue that affects anti-incumbent (first) vote choice, and then, accumulated electoral experience transforms this first choice into a persistent (non)partisan affiliation. I test this argument using the European Social Survey (ESS) rounds 1––11 across 29 European countries, together with cabinet data from ParlGov and economic indicators from the World Bank. I assign each respondent the average unemployment rate (socialization unemployment) and the party holding the Prime Minister's office (socialization incumbent) during the mandate preceding their first eligibility. So, the incumbent party facing re-election in such an electoral contest. Exploiting both within-cohort cross-country and within-country cross-cohort variation with country and eligibility-cohort fixed effect, I find that a one–SD increase in socialization unemployment reduces the probability of identifying with the socialization incumbent by about 2.8 percentage points later in life. Effects are concentrated under single-party majority cabinets. Among first-time voters, unemployment strongly predicts anti-incumbent voting, while anti-partisan identification emerges with accumulated electoral experience.

Download PDF

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.

Download PDF