Christopher Burnitt
Christopher Burnitt
I am a 4th year PhD student working in Political Economy. I am interested in topics such as identity, partisanship and polarisation.
More information about my research and current projects can be found on my personal website.
I am on the 2026-27 Job Market.
Fields: Political Economy, Applied Microeconomics.
Job Market Paper
"Failure to Launch: The impact of major party candidate dropout"
Abstract: Prominent partisan divides may inflate support for major party candidates, reinforcing their dominance. To test this, I exploit quasi-exogenous variation in the presence of one of two major political parties, arising from an unanticipated failure by the party to register candidates in some local government elections in New South Wales, Australia. I combine a difference-in-differences approach with detailed ballot-level ranking data. With this, I create a benchmark that separates out the mechanical substitution effect that arises from candidate absence even when voters rank candidates the same way. I find that the remaining major party's vote share falls significantly short of this benchmark, by 7.1 percentage points of enrolled voters. This shortfall is equivalent to 14.2 seats' worth of votes across all affected contests in which the party stood. Analysis of a corpus of candidate statements taken from online news articles is consistent with the framing of the contest changing in the absence of one major party—away from references to candidates' own parties, and towards communal moral language. These results suggest that major parties benefit from the partisan framing that their rivalry creates.
Working Papers
"Secession Clauses: Let them decide (to stay)"Link opens in a new window
Journal of Public Economics, Revised & Resubmitted [SSRN ArticleLink opens in a new window]
Publications
"Politics of Food: An Experiment on Trust in Expert Regulation and Economic Costs of Political Polarization"Link opens in a new window (with Jared Gars and Mateusz Stalinski)
Economic Journal, Forthcoming [Published Articled (open access)] [SSRN ArticleLink opens in a new window]
Work in Progress
"Disappointment, Populism, and Unrelated Beliefs" (with Helios Herrera and Mateusz Stalinski)
Teaching:
- EC202 Microeconomics 2 (Term 1, 23/24, Teaching Excellence Award)
- EC109 Microeconomics 1 (Term 2, 23/24, Teaching Excellence Award)