The COVID-19 pandemic brought sudden economic devastation and forced countries to respond with policies to counter the looming economic crisis. What policy response do citizens prefer to combat an economic decline due to a pandemic? We study the preferences of citizens regarding economic policy and changes in these preferences as the pandemic unfolded in Denmark. Denmark passed early and comprehensive legislation with broad support from all political parties to counter the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. We employ a large nationally representative two-wave panel of Danish citizens (N = 12,131) drawn from the administrative registers, from which data was collected at the onset of the economic shock and immediately prior to economic recovery. In both waves the same subjects describe their preferred economic solution to COVID-19 in open-text format. We generate a simple dictionary method to uncover a set of distinct laymen economic policy responses. First, we find that citizens formulated a diverse set of policy interventions. Second, citizens become markedly stronger proponents of economic intervention as the crisis unfolded. Finally, we show how differences in economic preferences across partisanship vanished during the crisis.
Legislative elections sustain authoritarian regimes. However, properties of any electoral system may simultaneously benefit and hurt regimes’ political prospects. We propose a trade-off between electoral systems facilitating parliamentary bargaining and electoral systems maintaining legislative control. While an electoral system can achieve either, it cannot solve both. We investigate this theory by studying Russian federal deputies, half of which are elected in a first-past-the-post single-member district, the other half on a nationwide closed-party list. Candidates can register on both lists, and district results determine final list affiliation. We exploit that electoral incentives change abruptly for deputies barely winning/losing the district, to identify effects of list affiliation on pro and anti-regime parliamentary behavior. Results support a trade-off: while district deputies bargain more for local amendments in parliamentary speeches, they also more often seek to obstruct legislation. How autocrats weigh this trade-off determines the electoral system, and illuminates electoral system reform in autocracies.
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