Research
Publications
Why do people vote in large elections? Theoretical arguments to resolve this ‘paradox’ of voting often build on individuals’ pro-social motivations, which make turnout decisions less sensitive to the pivot probability. We use register data covering the entire Norwegian vote-eligible population to test the ensuing hypothesis that the turnout gap between more/less pro-social individuals increases with electorate size. Our identification strategy leverages population-size shocks from inter-municipal mobility, while we proxy pro-social motivations via individuals’ charitable donations. We show that increasing electorate size widens the turnout gap between more/less pro-social individuals, and that turnout of pro-social individuals responds less to population-size shocks.
Working papers
“Universalism: An 11-year Longitudinal Study”, with Benny Geys and Rune Sørensen. Resubmitted to Economica.
How individuals make trade-offs between socially proximate or distant groups impacts upon a wide range of social, political and economic behaviors. This article exploits Norwegian administrative register data over the 2012-2022 period to assess whether and, if so, how such `(moral) universalism’ develops as individuals age and go through major life events. We show that aging is associated with increases in universalism in early adulthood and declining universalism among older individuals, but the magnitude of these changes remains very small. Similarly, major life events - such as starting higher education, first-time parenthood, positive income shocks, and retirement - are linked to at best minor and short-lived changes universalism. These results add important insights regarding the (in)stability of individuals’ value orientations during adulthood, and raise new questions about the potential influence of broader social forces on universalism across cohorts.
“Party Factions and Candidate Selection”, with Jon Fiva, Giovanna Invernizzi, Carlo Prato and Janne Tukiainen. Under review.
We study how political parties share power internally by analyzing the allocation of list positions to different factions. We develop a theory of intraparty bargaining in which list positions shape the mobilization efforts of party activists in different factions. Our results allow us to link observable patterns in list allocations to the importance of consensus in intraparty negotiations. We empirically evaluate these predictions using data from Norwegian municipal elections. We exploit a wave of municipal mergers to identify candidates’ geography-based factional affiliations. In line with our theory’s functionalist logic and consensus-based bargaining, smaller factions are over-compensated in both safe and contested list positions, but more so in safe positions. Our theoretical and empirical results show that parties can promote consensus among their factions while maintaining mobilization incentives, indicating that equality and efficiency within a political organization can be simultaneously achieved.
Work in progress
“Is Charitable Giving a Luxury Good?”, solo-authored.
Is charitable giving a luxury good? I study this question by examining how job displacement affects individual charitable giving, using administrative data on the universe of tax-deductible donations in Norway from 2004 to 2021 linked with employer-employee records. Exploiting mass layoffs as a source of plausibly exogenous variation, I find that displacement reduces donations by roughly twice the percentage decline in earnings, and that the gap widens over time as earnings recover but giving does not. The majority of the decline is driven by workers who stop donating altogether, suggesting that job loss breaks the giving habit. Disaggregating by cause reveals that the response is concentrated in donations to international aid organizations, which fall sharply on both margins. In contrast, religious giving declines in amount but shows no systematic donor attrition. The luxury good characterization thus applies to some forms of giving but not others.