Reports & Papers

Herzog, Baron, and Gibbons (HBG) thank Haley Daarstad, RyuGyung Park, and Timea Balogh for replicating their 2022 short article in The Journal of Politics. In that article, HBG tested the malleability of U.S. public support for nuclear disarmament, specifically in the context of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Their survey experiment reveals that––despite majority public support for eliminating nuclear weapons––Americans’ backing of the TPNW can be significantly attenuated by exposure to elite and group cues opposing the treaty. The resultant article has received considerable attention from policymakers and anti-nuclear activists alike. Daarstad, Park, and Balogh (DPB) offer three main substantive points of comment on HGB's article. First, DPB indicate that the results successfully replicate and note that they “do not find any coding errors that undermine the authors’ analysis or conclusions.” Second, DPB show that the findings also replicate when partisan leaners are coded as political Independents. Finally, and most interestingly, DPB conduct gender-based subgroup analysis and show that there are heterogenous treatment effects among male and female respondents in our sample. HBG address each of these points in turn.

In late 2017, Mexico made headlines as Italian company Enel bid what was then a world-record low price for renewable energy in the country’s third such energy auction. This development was possible due to the historical and sweeping energy reforms passed with broad support in Mexico in 2013. Then-President Enrique Peña Nieto had succeeded where previous Mexican presidents had failed, reversing decades of resource nationalism and overhauling the energy sector through constitutional reforms that gave the private sector a larger role and advantaged renewable energy in Mexico’s economy. The 2017 auction seemed to indicate Mexico’s bright future not only as a conventional oil producer, but also as a clean energy power.

This paper explores the effect of oil shocks on electoral outcomes. Using a new polling and election data set for 207 elections across 50 democracies, the paper shows that oil price increases systematically lower the odds of reelection for incumbents. The analysis verifies that these shocks—which reduce consumption growth—are associated with worsening performance for incumbents in the runup to reelection and a reversal in the leaning of the political party in power post-election.  

With rising population and incomes, the “rentier” mode of development in Saudi Arabia has long been unsustainable. While the issue of fiscal stabilization will occupy policy-making in Saudi Arabia in the short and medium terms, the long-term challenge of finding new sources of growth to complement oil has only been made starker by the recent drop in oil prices. Analysis of the prospects for such reforms in KSA has long been divided between two opposite camps: those who believe that the inadequacies of the rentier model will necessarily usher a doomsday scenario sooner or later, regardless of economic policies; and those who believe the impending crisis can be met by moving from the current mono-sector economy to a modern and diversified knowledge based economy OECD-style.