Our Seminars & Workshops

Two 30 minutes presentations:

i) Anisha will present Political Consequences of Urban Landscaping: Evidence from India.

Abstract - Do public goods shape political competition? We study whether urban civic infrastructure affects political mobilization. Exploiting variation from Delhi’s 1962 Master Plan, we instrument contemporary park allocation and combine it with newly assembled micro-level data on grassroots organizational presence (Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) morning assemblies). Neighborhoods with more parks host greater organizational activity and deliver higher vote shares to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2020 Assembly election. Estimates are robust to extensive socioeconomic and spatial controls and closely mirror OLS. In a panel of elections from 2008–2020, areas with more parks consistently exhibit higher BJP support, except in 2013, when the association shifts toward the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) following mass anti-corruption mobilization. These findings provide causal evidence that the spatial allocation of civic infrastructure can durably shape partisan competition in dense urban environments.

ii) Luc will present How to Silence Researchers? Evidence from Illiberal Policies in Hungary.

Abstract - Since the late 1990s, a growing number of countries have shifted toward “illiberal democracy”— regimes that maintain “free but unfair” elections while systematically undermining the rule of law. In this paper, we argue that contemporary illiberal democracies have detrimental effects on innovation, and specifically on academic research. Using national and international bibliometric data, we show that academics’ research trajectories diverge sharply depending on their perceived political alignment. Researchers perceived as political opponents experience substantially larger declines in both publication output and collaboration networks, with each decreasing by about a quarter of its pre-shock level per year. At the same time, they are more likely to publicly criticize the regime. Similarly, researchers working on gender-related topics are also disproportionately affected: they experience a decrease of 10% in total publications and 30% in publications in top journals. Finally, we conduct cross-country, individual-level comparisons to estimate the broader effect of the loss of freedom on academia. We find that Hungarian researchers increasingly shift their publication efforts toward lower-quality, national-language journals and are more likely to leave the country altogether.