Publications


Polity Size and the Congested Budget: Evidence from Italian Municipalities

with Massimo Morelli
Accepted, Journal of Politics

Once in office, politicians propose policies aimed at maintaining the support of their constituencies. This form of political activism increases with polity size – i.e., the number of politicians in government – but it may clash with capacity constraints, leading to a congestion effect whereby politicians’ plans are not enacted in practice. With novel data on Italian municipalities, we estimate the causal effect of polity size on a battery of planned and actual budget outcomes. We leverage a reform that introduced a new temporary population threshold where polity size changed discontinuously and estimate local treatment effects with a difference-in-discontinuities design. We document a congestion effect. Municipalities with larger polities have a larger planned budget which does not translate into a larger actual budget. The congestion effect decreases when bureaucratic capacity is high, proving how administrative capacity can be a binding constraint for politicians’ behavior.



A Costly Commitment: Populism, Government Performance, and the Quality of Bureaucracy

with Massimo Morelli and Matia Vannoni
2023, American Journal of Political Science
Covered by VoxEU.org

We study the consequences of populism for economic performance and the quality of bureaucracy. When voters lose trust in representative democracy, populists strategically supply unconditional policy commitments that are easier to monitor for voters. When in power, populists try to implement their policy commitments regardless of financial constraints and expert assessment of the feasibility of their policies, worsening government economic performance and dismantling resistance from expert bureaucrats. With novel data on more than 8,000 Italian municipalities covering more than 20 years, we estimate the effect of electing a populist mayor with a close-election regression discontinuity design. We find that the election of a populist mayor leads to smaller repayments of debts, a larger share of procurement contracts with cost overruns, higher turnover among top bureaucrats – driven by forced rather than voluntary departures – and a sharp decrease in the percentage of graduate bureaucrats.



A Dynamic Measure of Bureaucratic Reputation: New Data for New Theory

2022, American Journal of Political Science

Bureaucratic reputation is one of the most important concepts used to understand the behaviour of administrative agencies and their interactions with multiple audiences. Despite a rich theoretical literature discussing reputation, we do not have a comparable measure across agencies, between countries, and over time. I present a new strategy to measure bureaucratic reputation from legislative speeches with word-embedding techniques. I introduce an original dataset on the reputation of 465 bureaucratic bodies over a period of forty years, and across two countries, the US and the UK. I perform several validation tests and present an application of this method to investigate whether partisanship and agency politicisation matter for reputation. I find that agencies enjoy a better reputation among the members of the party in government, with partisan differences less pronounced for independent bodies. I finally discuss how this measurement strategy can contribute to classical and new questions about political-administrative interactions.





Under Review


The Shift to Commitment Politics and Populism: Theory and Evidence

with Massimo Morelli, Antonio Nicolò and Paolo Roberti

We present a theory of populism centered on commitment politics – a type of agency relationship in which candidates promise specific and monitorable policies. The shift to commitment politics is driven by increased distrust toward government institutions, itself a consequence of cognitive complexity and disinformation typical of modern social media environments. Candidates who adopt a commitment platform rationally choose all the complementary strategies associated with populism, including anti-elite rhetoric, misinformation, aversion to judicial independence, and bureaucratic expertise. The paper presents observational and experimental evidence from the United States on the supply and demand of commitment consistent with the model’s key predictions.



Group Appeals and Political Mobilization: Evidence from U.S. House Races

with Alonso Roman Amarales and Catherine E. De Vries

Group membership plays a crucial role in political conflict, with candidates frequently using group appeals to mobilize voters. However, the factors influencing candidates’ decisions to employ such appeals remain insufficiently understood. We propose an argument rooted in the notion that candidates selectively deploy group appeals to maximize electoral returns and we introduce a novel method for detecting group appeals in text, which is applied to the universe of tweets posted by U.S. House candidates between 2012-2021. We present three findings. First, candidates’ group membership and their district’s demographic composition are strongly associated with the frequency of group appeals. Second, protest events associated with specific groups increase appeals to those groups. Third, except for young voters, there is limited evidence that these appeals enhance turnout intentions. These findings offer new insights into how politicians strategically engage underrepresented groups in the electorate, contributing to our understanding of identity-based political mobilization.



Age Gaps Between Political Leaders and the Public Can Undermine Satisfaction with Democracy

with Alonso Roman Amarales and Scott Williamson

Many democracies elect political leaders who are substantially older than the public. This pattern has raised concerns that age gaps will weaken confidence in democratic representation, thereby reducing support for democracy. We find that this concern is warranted, documenting consistent evidence that age gaps undermine satisfaction with democracy in one’s own country, and weaker evidence that age gaps reduce general support for democracy. Analysis of legislator age data from dozens of democracies shows that support for democracy is lower where age gaps are higher. Observational and experimental analysis from original surveys in Italy, South Korea, and the United States further establishes that people are less satisfied with democracy when they believe politicians are too old, and that exposure to information about age gaps undermines confidence in democratic representation and performance. With a conjoint experiment, we provide additional evidence that age gaps can weaken evaluations of representational quality, but less so than gender gaps. Results are similar across age cohorts, suggesting that age gaps constitute a general challenge to democratic satisfaction rather than fueling intergenerational conflict over democracy.





Working Papers


Bureaucratic Information in Congress

Bureaucratic agencies produce a wealth of information that can be used by politicians when making policies. However, little is known about the extent to which members of Congress rely on bureaucratic information and what factors they consider when they do so. I introduce a novel measure of politicians’ reliance on bureaucratic information which uses natural language processing to extract and analyze bureaucratic information used by members of Congress in congressional speeches, newsletters, and social media. I find that members make greater use of information coming from ideologically similar bureaucracies, especially in floor speeches and during legislative hearings. Leveraging the Supreme Court’s decision in Seila Law vs. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – which curtailed the independence of the CFPB – as a shock to the independence to the bureau, I find that members’ reliance on the information produced by the CFPB drops as a result of the court’s decision to. Statutory features insulating agencies from political control sharply increase members’ reliance on bureaucratic information. These findings have implications for theories of separation of powers and for the use of evidence in policy-making.





Work in Progress


Campaign Contributions and Self-Reports: How Accurate Are Survey Responses Regarding Donation Behavior?

with Mike Barber and Brandice Canes-Wrone

Personnel is Policy: Delegation and Political Misalignment in the Rulemaking Process

with Massimo Morelli, Jörg Spenkuch, Edoardo Teso, Matia Vannoni, and Guo Xu

The Executive Unbound? The Rise of A Politicized Bureaucracy under DOGE

with Kyuwon Lee

A New Language-Based Measure of Bureaucratic Ideology


The pro-Democrat Penalty: The Political Consequences of Regulatory Enforcement in the United States


Bureaucratic Responsiveness to Multiple Principals: Evidence from High-Frequency Social Media Data

with Hye Young You

We examine federal agencies’ responsiveness to multiple principals, focusing on the President, House Appropriations Committee members, and oversight committees. Utilizing a novel dataset of 2.17 million tweets from 94 agencies posted between 2010 and 2022, matched with 2.5 million tweets from members of Congress and presidents, we employ stance detection methods to classify tweets mentioning agencies as supportive, opposing, or neutral. Our findings reveal that agencies are highly responsive to supportive mentions, particularly from the President, resulting in a significant increase in Twitter activity. Conversely, agencies are less responsive to criticism. Using an event-study design, we show that when criticized by the President, agencies shift their focus to policy issues, indicating a reputation-maximizing strategy. This study underscores the unique role of social media in modern bureaucratic politics, where real-time signals from political principals significantly influence agency behavior and communication strategies.