Attend the PEPE workshop 2026

Organised by the Public and Political Economy Research Group our Political Economy and Public Economics (PEPE) workshops are a forum for the sharing and discussion of leading research in these areas.

We invite scholars from across the globe to present their work and facilitate conversations about contemporary challenges and trends.

Workshops are open to all. They include presentations, breaks for informal discussions, and opportunities for attendees to connect with leading researchers across the field of public and political economy.

2026 workshop

• Dates: 23 April and 24 April
• Location: 1 West, Room 2.102

Attend the PEPE workshop 2026

Day 1: 23 April

Day 2: 24 April

Workshop abstracts

We will add more abstracts to this list soon. Please check this page regularly for updates.

Francesco Capozza (Universitat de Barcelona)

Majority Lost: Global Evidence and Field Experiments on Electoral Miscoordination (With Ruben Durante and Siddarth George)

We study how often and why voters in multiparty systems fail to coordinate on majority-preferred parties, and whether low-cost viability information can mitigate these failures. Combining CLEA, V–Party, MARPOR, and WPID, we construct cross-national indicators of weak and strong coordination failures and show they are widespread, shaped by institutions and party organisation, and systematically disadvantage fragmented opposition and culturally liberal parties. Four constituency-level polling experiments in Indian state elections reveal precisely estimated null effects of locally tailored viability information on vote intentions and preferences, despite modest belief updating, highlighting binding expressive motives and limits to polls as coordination devices.

Pavel Chakraborty (University of Bath)

Ethnic Politics and the Distributional Effects of Trade Liberalization: Evidence from India (with A. Aneja and S. K. Ritadhi)

Can globalization shocks contribute to the rise of identity politics? We examine this question in the context of India’s 1991 trade liberalization episode, and study how tariff reforms contributed to the electoral success of caste-based parties during the 1990s. Combining industry-level tariffs with pre-reform employment shares in a shift-share design, we find that regions facing larger reductions in trade protection witnessed increased political support for parties committed to the representation of marginalized caste groups. Increases in both caste-based party vote share and total seats are concentrated in areas that are more rural, lower skilled, and have larger concentrations of voters from marginalized caste groups. Examining mechanisms, we find tariff reforms to have widened the caste earnings gap, in large part due to the adverse consequences of tariff reforms falling on agricultural workers — a segment of the labour market in which marginalized castes are heavily over-represented. The empirical findings are thus consistent with the explanation that the adverse effects of trade liberalization were disproportionately borne by historically marginalized citizens, who in turn voted for ethnic parties advocating their policy interests.

Cecilia Testa (University of Nottingham)

Ballot, Badge, and Bench: Black Representation in Southern Justice (with Andrea Bernini, Giovanni Facchini and Hye Young You)

The election of law enforcement and judicial officials is a distinctive feature of American democracy. Yet, the democratic promise of elected justice sits uneasily alongside enduring racial disparities in the justice system. By compiling the most comprehensive dataset to date, covering all counties in the eleven former Confederate states from 1960 to 2024, we explore to what extent Blacks have closed their historical representation gap in the justice system. Using variation in federal oversight of local voting laws, we provide evidence on the effect of constraints on descriptive representation, emphasising voter preferences, candidate supply, and mobilisation. Early gains were limited by weak professional pipelines restricting candidate supply. Over time, as constraints eased and civil rights organisations intensified mobilisation, Black representation increased substantially, particularly following the Black Lives Matter movement. Our findings highlight how political institutions, structural constraints, and organised mobilisation jointly shape trajectories of Black representation in the justice system.

Ludovica Gazzè (University of Warwick)

People, Places or Houses? Households' Carbon Emissions in the UK (with Lucie Gadenne, Peter Levell and Davide Sansone)

Understanding the determinants of households' carbon emissions is key to designing successful decarbonization policies. We examine the role of household tastes and "places" in explaining household GHG emissions from transport and housing energy in the UK using a long household panel dataset and a mover design. Our detailed data on the characteristics of houses and places households live in enables us to go beyond a simple decomposition between household and geography fixed effects and investigate the causal effects of different aspects of places on emissions. Most of the impact of granular "geography" fixed effects is due to observable house characteristics, which alone explain one-fourth of the variation in household emissions. Counterfactual analysis suggests that electrifying all UK homes would yield much larger emission decreases than further greening the grid, though both policies have particularly large effects on households with high baseline emissions, including amongst the poor. Thus, investing in greening places, and in particular homes, would help make carbon pricing more horizontally equitable, thereby overcoming a key political constraint on the path to net zero.

Robertas Zubrickas (University of Bath)

Norms in Conflict: Why AI Advisors Fail to Improve Human Coordination (with Zhongheng Qiao, Alex Tabarrok, and Timothy N. Cason)

Cooperation failures in social dilemmas persist because individually rational behavior yields inefficient collective outcomes. Advances in AI raise two possibilities: AI may improve outcomes by advising humans or by acting autonomously. We test both in a repeated threshold public-goods experiment with heterogeneous valuations of the public good. Such threshold games model a broad class of burden-sharing problems (crowdfunding, shared infrastructure, multilateral agreements) in which efficiency requires not only coordination but agreement on a cost-sharing norm. We compare a human-only benchmark to treatments with an AI advisor (OpenAI’s GPT-5) and to treatments in which AI agents make allocations directly. AI-only groups outperform human groups, reaching the threshold more often. The mechanism is illuminating: AI agents contribute near-equal amounts largely independent of valuations, whereas humans scale contributions with valuations. In contrast, AI advisors do not improve human-only outcomes. We distinguish two bottlenecks to coordination: an information bottleneck, in which parties lack the calculations needed to condition on others’ behavior, and a legitimacy bottleneck, in which parties reject cost-sharing rules that conflict with their fairness norms. AI overcomes the first but not the second.

Simone Cremaschi (University of Oxford)

Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right: Evidence from England's NHS (with Zachary P. Dickson, Sara B. Hobolt and Catherine E. De Vries)

The rise of populist right parties is well-studied, but relatively little attention has been given to how public service performance influences voter support. Given that public services are often the primary means through which citizens interact with the state, we argue that declining public services can create grievances that increase the appeal of populist right parties. Focusing on England’s National Health Service (NHS), we combine administrative data on local health facility closures with panel data on public preferences and voting intentions. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that closures reduce satisfaction with public services and increase support for populist right parties. These effects are moderated by migrant registrations at local health practices, highlighting the interaction between public service performance and immigration concerns in fueling populist right support. Our findings underscore the role of public service decline as a driver of support for populist parties, especially in areas undergoing demographic change.

Agustina Martinez (University of Leicester)

The Power of Words: Economic Conditions, Political Discourse, and Support for Populism (with L. Menéndez and H. Redondo)

We study the relationship between economic conditions, political discourse, and electoral support for populist parties. Our analysis focuses on the rise of the Spanish far-right party Vox, which gained significant support during a period of economic recovery. Combining administrative labour market records, congressional speeches, social media data, and public opinion surveys, our analysis proceeds in two stages. First, using a shift-share approach, we show that the distributional composition of local employment growth predicts changes in support for Vox at the municipality level. Second, we show that Vox strategically targets its discourse by topic and region, and that this targeting causally shifts citizen concerns about current Spanish issues. Our results suggest that electoral success depends not only on economic fundamentals but also on the supply of narratives that shape citizen perceptions of issue salience.

Aniol Llorente-Saguer (Queen Mary University of London)

Ballot Richness and Information Aggregation (with Laurent Bouton, Antonin Macé, and Dimitrios Xefteris)

When voters have different information quality, voting rules with richer ballot spaces can help voters better aggregate information by endogenously allocating more decision power to better-informed members. Using laboratory experiments, we compare two polar examples of voting rules in terms of ballot richness: majority voting (MV) and continuous voting (CV). Our results show that CV outperforms MV on average, although the difference is smaller than predicted, and that CV has more support than MV in treatments where it is expected to perform better. We also find that voters with intermediate information overestimate the importance of their votes under CV.

Jaideep Roy (University of Bath)

Communication Institutions and Duverger’s Law (with Archishman Chakraborty and Graham Snell)

We study the role of post-electoral communication in the formation of a two-party system. The winning candidate can communicate with an expert with known ideological bias who learns a policy-relevant uncertain state post-election and before policies are implemented. We characterize the set of equilibria in terms of candidate positioning under two institutionally different communication environments — one where, before learning the state, the expert builds his own institution that communicates on his behalf, and one where the expert has no institution-building power. We find that both the voter and the expert always value communication, but they may be in conflict over the form of communication. Curiously, the voter may prefer an expert who enjoys the power to build institutions to serve his own policy preferences, while the expert prefers to give up such powers. Furthermore, provided the ideological bias of the voter and the expert are sufficiently far apart, the voter always values representative democracy over policy-making via direct communication between the expert and the voter himself. However, direct democracy is always the best institution.

Past workshops

2025 workshop

In the 2025 edition, the workshop explored how economic tools can help us understand political behaviour, policy choices, and institutional design. The programme included a range of talks on topics such as cohort effects, sexual harassment and media silence, strategic voting, activist-politician interactions, conflict, femonationalist speech in European parliaments, jury-based decision-making, and the credibility costs of academics’ political expression on social media.

See the full programme from 25 April 2025 below.

2024 workshop

2024's workshop was titled: Workshop on Political Economy, Public and Development Economics

See the full programme from 26 April 2024 below.