We study the communication strategies on Twitter-X of 367 political leaders in 21 countries, focusing on electoral competition between populists and non-populists. We measure polarization by the ease with which the leader can be classified as populist or not, conditional on their tweet. We find that political rhetoric becomes more polarized before and around election dates. This happens because, in pre-electoral quarters, opposite leaders are more likely to: (i) talk about different topics, and (ii) frame differently the same issues. Our results are consistent with competing politicians targeting different voters, rather than appealing to the same swing voters.

The determinants of voting behavior are difficult to identify. In this paper, I adopt a spatial voting framework and propose a method that uses partial rankings of parties to identify the ideological dimensions of party competition that matter to voters. I apply this method to the German Longitudinal Election Study from 2013–2022 that records each respondent’s partial ranking of three most preferred parties (triples). Results indicate that (i) the Left–Right dimension rationalizes the largest share of triples in every year, with its share falling from about 50% in 2013 to about 40% in 2022, and (ii) the Anti-Elite dimension grows in importance over time, matching the Economy dimension by 2022. I further suggest how to test the importance of these dimensions formally, illustrate robustness of this approach to misreporting of party preferences due to stigma, and provide evidence that the rationalizability results correlate in an expected way with voters' reported views and characteristics.

Do political preferences matter for the university choice of students? In this paper, we investigate this question in the context of a polarized Western democracy—France. Using administrative data on the universe of high school graduates in France, we first present descriptive evidence of political sorting of students into universities. We find that (i) students are 14% more likely to apply to universities that are closer to them in political leaning; (ii) students matched to politically congruent universities, on average, forgo 5% of university selectivity; and (iii) the importance of political congruence intensifies in proximity to elections. Next, leveraging a conjoint experiment with 1,040 students across 40 high schools, we quantify the importance of political congruence relative to other university choice factors and find that students are willing to travel approximately one additional hour to attend a university aligned with their values. We develop a novel technique for combining administrative and experimental survey data, and use it to quantify the importance of political sorting on welfare. Our results show that, absent political sorting, students’ applications would on average be 21 km closer to their home. This highlights potential societal welfare losses induced by political sorting into universities.