Mo­gens Kamp Justesen

This pro­ject ad­dresses a fun­da­ment­al puzzle of elect­or­al polit­ics and its con­sequences for firms and pub­lic goods: Why do or­din­ary voters, in­clud­ing the poor, some­times vote ex­tremely rich busi­ness ty­coons into polit­ic­al of­fice? And does the elec­tion of ty­coons mat­ter for the firms they own and the voters they are sup­posed to serve? These ques­tions are ad­dressed in two re­lated work-pack­ages. First, we ex­am­ine sources of voter sup­port for ty­coons, fo­cus­ing on per­cep­tions of can­did­ate com­pet­ence, cor­rup­tion, and the use of cli­en­tel­ism to mo­bil­ize voter sup­port. We ex­am­ine this us­ing sur­vey ex­per­i­ments in Ukraine and South Africa, where ty­coons play a prom­in­ent role in polit­ics. Second, we zoom in on the ef­fects of ty­coon in­cum­bency for the firms they own and for pub­lic goods pro­vi­sion. To ex­am­ine this, we ex­ploit a series of re­gres­sion-dis­con­tinu­ity designs us­ing data from closely con­tested na­tion­al elec­tions across demo­cra­cies and from loc­al elec­tions in Brazil and South Africa.