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Research has shown that first-time voting experiences affect subsequent voting behavior, with salient elections boosting subsequent …

Amidst the COVID-19 lockdowns, it became obvious that migrants play a critical role in economic sectors that are essential to the functioning of everyday life. Are they over-represented in these sectors, and how is the use of migrant labour linked to structural factors in the provision of essential services? Using micro data from the EU Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) 2011-2020 for 17 countries, this paper investigates the extent and the drivers of migrants’ over-representation in key sectors (e.g. health, long-term care, food supply) relative to the rest of the economy. We measure the difference in the probability of working in key sectors for various types of migrants to similar natives across countries of destination. Our results show that in most countries, migrants are over-represented with respect to native-born workers after accounting for individual characteristics. We also provide an overview of the correlation between this residual over-representation and potential structural factors. We find a strong and robust correlation between migrants’ relative employment probability in key sectors and precarious job conditions, the degree of autonomy and flexibility at work, as well as attitudes to migrants, both at the country-level and across sub-national regions.

This paper investigates the effects of campaign finance rules on electoral outcomes. In French departmental and municipal elections, candidates competing in districts above 9,000 inhabitants face spending limits and are eligible for public reimbursement if they obtain more than five percent of the votes. Using an RDD around the population threshold, we find that these rules increase competitiveness and benefit the runner-up of the previous race as well as new candidates, in departmental elections, while leaving the polarization and representativeness of the results unaffected. Incumbents are less likely to get reelected because they are less likely to run and obtain a lower vote share, conditional on running. These results appear to be driven by the reimbursement of campaign expenditures, not spending limits. We do not find such effects in municipal elections, which we attribute to the use of a proportional list system instead of plurality voting.