Political Economy

Professor Pons' political economy research has three broad components, corresponding to three critical steps in the democratic process, with a focus on the role played by political parties.

First, representative democratic outcomes hinge on most or all eligible citizens engaging in the political game and participating in elections. Professor Pons has run field experiments spanning entire countries and embedded in real campaigns to study the effects of voter outreach efforts, to identify which barriers to voting they can effectively reduce, and to measure the gains candidates and parties can expect from them. An experiment on voter registration in France showed that both the provision of information and the facilitation of administrative registration requirements could substantially increase political participation and improve the representation of marginalized groups without diminishing the overall level of voter awareness. Another large-scale field experiment, embedded in François Hollande’s campaign in the 2012 French presidential election, revealed that partisan campaigns can have a large and lasting impact on vote shares. A more recent project estimates a value-added model on panel data covering the vast majority of the U.S. voting-age population to assess the relative influence of contextual drivers of voter behavior, such as party activities, election rules, and economic growth, vs. individual factors, such as race and education.

Second, Professor Pons studies the mechanisms of how elections aggregate voters’ preferences, namely: which candidates decide to run and on which positions, how voters form their preferences and translate them into vote choices, and how the voting rule translates ballots cast into election outcomes such as the designation of a new president or parliament. The programmatic work done by political parties and the alliances they strike with each other can help structure the multi-dimensional policy space, narrow down the number of candidates and increase the representativeness of elected leaders. A recent study uses a regression discontinuity design to show that the plurality rule often leads to suboptimal outcomes, due to failed coordination by both parties and voters: in a large fraction of elections, voters have to choose between more than two candidates, due to parties’ failure to reach an agreement, and a large fraction of them vote expressively (for the candidate they prefer) instead of strategically (for a candidate with a chance of winning) in that case.

Third, democracies’ ability to deliver social and economic outcomes aligned with people’s preferences depends on the extent to which elected governments turn electoral results into actual policies. Representatives may fail to implement the policies for which they were elected, due to limited capacity, misaligned incentives, or constraints imposed by supranational and subnational forces. In a new project studying all national elections in the world since 1789, Professor Pons assesses the extent to which voters obtain the change (in policies and ensuing outcomes) for which they vote when they put a new party in power.