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In this article, we study the political implications of terrorism rooted in extremist political ideologies. Our data uniquely allow studying the potential role of party leader evaluations on political outcomes, including voter turnout and vote choice. To strengthen causal identification, we combine an event-study framework with the fact that Norwegians were affected personally to differing degrees by the 22 July 2011 terror attack because of variation in the victims' municipalities of residence. Our main findings suggest that extreme right-wing terrorism influences party vote intentions and evaluations of political leaders strongly in the short run, as well as party choice in actual elections in the longer run. We document shifts within Norway's left-right political blocs rather than shifts between those blocs frequently observed following religious/separatist violence.
This article exploits variation in age among first-time eligible citizens in Norwegian elections that arises through voting eligibility rules and two-year election cycles to investigate voting habits. I find that obtaining the right to vote at a lower age is associated with substantially higher turnout among first-time eligible citizens, however, this difference in political participation does not persist for subsequent elections. Building on the established literature on the habitual nature of voting, the results show that getting young citizens to vote once is not sufficient to create a habit of voting, and suggest that how the voting decision is made matter for the habit formation process.* Øystein M. Hernaes, The
We evaluate the impact on youth crime of a welfare reform that tightened activation requirements for social assistance clients. The evaluation strategy exploits administrative individual data in combination with geographically differentiated implementation of the reform. We find that the reform reduced crime among teenage boys from economically disadvantaged families. Stronger reform effects on weekday versus weekend crime, reduced school dropout, and favorable long-run outcomes in terms of crime and educational attainment point to both incapacitation and human capital accumulation as key mechanisms. Despite lowered social assistance take-up, we uncover no indication that loss of income support pushed youth into crime.
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