Nina Nikiforova

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 shape where students choose to study? We investigate this question in France, combining administrative data on the universe of Parcoursup applicants with the conjoint survey experiment conducted with 1,040 final-year high school students. We document that students are more likely to apply to universities whose campus political climate aligns with their own political leaning. Survey evidence confirms that campus political climate enters students' university utility function with a weight comparable to distance, since students are willing to travel approximately one additional hour to attend a climate-aligned institution. To move from correlation to causation, we combine the two data sources following a ratio-transfer approach that corrects for endogeneity. Counterfactual simulations removing political taste imply students would attend programs closer to home and at marginally lower academic selectivity in partial equilibrium. The reallocation is concentrated among high-grade and working-class students.