Gemma Dipoppa

Thrilled to see our paper on “Spending Limits, Public Funding, and Election Outcomes” published in the @jeeanews.bsky.social! 👇👇
We investigate the effects of far-reaching campaign finance rules, with Nikolaj Broberg and Clemence Tricaud.
Short thread on what we do and find (1/n).

Spending Limits, Public Funding, and Election Outcomes Abstract. This paper investigates the effects of campaign finance rules on electoral outcomes. In French local elections, candidates competing in districts

Forthcoming article "Spending Limits, Public Funding, and Election Outcomes" by Nikolaj Broberg @vinpons.bsky.social and Clemence Tricaud
@eeanews.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1093/jeea...

The Logic of State Surveillance Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

Feedbacks are most welcome!

Working paper 👉 www.nber.org/papers/w34492

Coauthor: Annalisa Pezone 🙌 sites.google.com/nyu.edu/anna...

11/
🎯 The takeaway:
States use surveillance as a preventive tool against the empowerment of educated but excluded groups.

👉 As excluded groups gain political empowerment, surveillance may reproduce inequalities by silencing them exactly as they gain political voice.

10/ Across democracy and dictatorship, and with more and less technology to collect data, the logic of surveillance was similar:

States target those combining political capacity (education) with radical grievances (subalternity).

9/ ➡️ Result 3:

Across 5 indicators of political activism—voting, protests, strikes, holding political roles, and armed resistance—educated cohorts did not become more engaged.

Surveillance expanded preventively, not in reaction to mobilization.

8/ ➡️ Result 2:
Who faced the brunt of surveillance? The working class. The newly educated poor were watched longer, more harshly, and more intensively, consistently with the state fearing their empowerment.

7/ The effect persists even when individuals move elsewhere, in line with surveillance following a portable asset (education) rather than municipal-level changes.

6/ We present 3 results:

➡️ Result 1:

Municipality-cohorts exposed to more schooling were 64% more likely to be surveilled.

The effect increases as the state expands education and disappears when later reforms equalize schooling across municipalities.

5/ 🎲 The shock:

The Casati Law mandated primary schooling for 2 years everywhere but extended it for +2 years in towns >4,000 inhabitants and cohorts born post 1854.

We show the reform reduced illiteracy and use it in a difference-in-discontinuity design by population and cohort.

4/ 📃 📄 Descriptively, educated people were more likely to be watched. But education may proxy for background, status, or other fixed attributes.

We need a shock to education that affects otherwise similar people.

3/ Unsupervised LLM on 1,200+ police files shows that mobilization capacity – and a particular marker of it, education, – together with potential for subversion are recurring traits noted by the surveillance state. 📚

2/ 💡 We propose that states strategically target those combining capacity to mobilize with grievances for radical mobilization – educated but subaltern individuals perceived as most threatening to state stability.

This idea is rooted in descriptive data:

🚨 New WP 🚨:

All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why?

We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy.

🧵 1/11

Call for Submissions: Democratic Resilience and the Politics of Belonging

Columbia, June 4-5, 2026

Co-Organizers: @aalrababah.bsky.social (Bocconi), @gemmadipoppa.bsky.social (Columbia), Shigeo Hirano (Columbia), @ginvernizzi.bsky.social (Bocconi)

Submit: lnkd.in/eiPgt_w5

Details ⬇️

🧾NEW WP! New data, old divide 🧵

🇮🇹Our new @theifs.bsky.social WP
"The #Geography of #Child #Disability in #Italy: New Evidence from Administrative Data" (w/ P Biasi & De Paola) uses administrative data on the 2024 Universal Child Allowance, covering 4m children under 10.
🔗 tinyurl.com/yk89t39e

@gemmadipoppa.bsky.social and I summarize the main findings from our @nature.com article on air pollution, crop burning, and public health in South Asia in @voxdev.bsky.social 👇🏽

Substantial earnings penalties exist for racial minorities in France. Compared to the US, lower overall inequality benefits French racial minorities, but rank gaps are comparable, from Yajna Govind, Paolo Santini, and Ellora Derenoncourt https://www.nber.org/papers/w34013

Thank you @voxdev.bsky.social for covering our (w @saadgulzar.bsky.social) work on bureaucrat incentives to reduce crop-related fires and air pollution! Full paper at www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In Italy, a major tax credit favored middle earners and boosted votes for incumbents, revealing a political-economy tradeoff, from Silvia Vannutelli https://www.nber.org/papers/w33973

🚨 Big News for European Political Science 🚨

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the European Political Science Society (EPSS): a new, member-led, not-for-profit association built to support our scholarly community.

🔗 epssnet.org

Here’s a thread with everything you need to know.

🧵

🚨 June 30th deadline approaching 🚨

📣 Call for papers - CEMIR Junior Economist Workshop on #Migration Research 2025

📅 Event held October 28-29, 2025 in Munich at
@cesifo.org

🗣️ With a keynote from Jens Hainmueller ‪of
@stanford.edu

⌛ Details/Submit here: www.ifo.de/w/85244ca1

Version 2.0 of the National Elections Database is online! nationalelectionsdatabase.com
We cover presidential and parliamentary elections 1789–2023, extending the post-1945 data of Electoral Turnovers @reveconstudies.bsky.social (academic.oup.com/restud/advan...)
w/ Benjamin Marx and Vincent Rollet

Workplace Politics: How Politicians and Employers Subvert Elections In many countries politicians rely on employers to influence the voting behavior of their employees, but this type of voter mobilization has received very little attention. draws on unique surveys ...

Now available for preorder from Oxford University Press. Makes good beach reading too. www.amazon.com/Workplace-Po...

We have a great lineup of papers for the Junior Workshop in HPE. A limited number of spots are available for scholars interested in attending the workshop. Fill this form if you want to join us next June 25 at UC3M forms.gle/DckGoQDfniTU... @tinepaulsen.bsky.social @franvillamil.bsky.social

🚨 New working paper 🚨

@yangyangzhou.bsky.social, @shuningge.bsky.social, Naijia Liu, and I have completed a shareable draft of our working paper entitled "Liberalizing Refugee Hosting Policies without Losing the Vote." We hope you find it interesting.

See osf.io/preprints/os....

Happy to share a new paper now out in EJPR w/ @jeyalizade.bsky.social , @fabioellger.bsky.social and @mgruenewald.bsky.social exploring gendered effects of political violence on political supply.

https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1475-6765.70017

A 🧵 with findings

Here's last year's program. The conference is generously funded by Brown University through the Orlando Bravo Center for Economic Research and the PPE Center

📌 Excited to announce the 2nd Northeast Political Economy Conference 📌 We (briangknight.bsky.social) are seeking submissions from economists & political scientists working on political economy topics.

Please submit by June 16 and join us at Brown on Friday, Oct 3 forms.gle/i4wi88Q6P3tJ...

One week left to submit!