Declining voter participation has raised concerns about the responsiveness and sustainability of democratic systems. Research into the consequences of turnout variations provides mixed evidence and mostly relies on debated weather-induced shocks for identification. I shed new light on this topic by studying the effects of a reform that suddenly cut polling stations by 30% in Italy as part of broader fiscal consolidation measures. This setting allows me to extend the analysis of electoral effects of turnout in a multi-party system, with sound identification, and with a precise grasp of underlying mechanisms. Leveraging variation at the municipality level in a fuzzy difference-in-differences design combined with a new Wikipedia-based measure of political ideology, I provide causal evidence on the intertwined relationship between voting access, participation, and electoral outcomes. Potential mechanisms are explored through the analysis of precinct-level and geo-referenced individual survey data. The paper provides three main contributions. First, restricting voting access determines a decline in voter participation consistent with habit-formation. Second, lower participation is driven by demobilization of disaffected marginal voters with economic grievances, who derive little satisfaction from turning out. Third, the exogenous reduction in turnout induces a persistent rightward shift in the political position of the electorate, redistributes vote shares from extreme to moderate party groups, and affects support differently across party ideologies.

Do voters reward or punish ideological shifts of politicians at the ballot box? This paper examines the electoral consequences of ideological party switching through the lenses of accountability theory. While prior research has produced mixed findings - primarily focusing on high-level elections and often conflating ideological change with performance - this study isolates the ideological component of switching. Using data from local elections in Italy, a context marked by frequent party switching and pronounced political polarization, I assess the re-election prospects of incumbent politicians who change ideological poles suring their term in office compared to those who remain ideologically consistent. Leveraging detailed administrative data to measure performance, the analysis reveals an electoral penalty for ideological switchers between 4 and 12 percentage points. My findings underscore the symbolic importance of ideological congruence in retrospective voting. Switching ideology emerges as an electoral liability highlighting the electoral salience of ideological consistency , an overlooked dimension of accountability in democratic politics.

The study addresses the performance of female mayors in local administrations. We use detailed data from Italian municipalities over an extended time period and a Sharp Regression Discontinuity design. Results suggest that women winning close mixed-gender elections reduce the size of local government. Female mayors spend less, especially on local bureaucracy, roads services, and urban planning. They do so by relaxing budget rigidities and by limiting wasteful spending. Commensurate with this pattern, they also collect less revenue. In particular they impose a lower tax burden and charge lower fees for public services compared to male mayors, resulting in lighter financial impositions on citizens. Despite lower resources being available, female-headed municipalities are better able to maintain the same level of services for the public. The study suggests that female mayors are more efficient than their male counterparts in running local administrative machinery. Female mayors do not have better chances of re-election, but the efficiency gains from having had a female mayor appear to be long lasting.

Does austerity really kill? Vis-à-vis an expanding literature uncovering several adverse health outcomes of cuts in public spending, convincing causal evidence is still lacking. In this paper, we leverage an unexpected variation in the Italian Domestic Stability Pact, introduced in 2011, which forced Italian municipalities within a certain population threshold to suddenly cut public expenditure. We find that the unexpected budget tightening led to an instantaneous increase in mortality rates. Adverse health effects are heterogeneous across age groups, with the elderly being the most affected, and geography, with municipalities in more deprived areas suffering the most. These findings allow us to have a better understanding of the opportunity-costs of expenditure-based fiscal consolidation. Critical appears to be not only whether budget cuts are preferred to tax increases, but which cuts are chosen within the budget menu.