Reverse Political Coattails under a Technocratic Government: New Evidence on the National Electoral Benefits of Local Party Incumbency

Does the control of local offices benefit parties in national elections when local incumbents are not strategically supported by the central government? To address this question, I study the national electoral effects of local party incumbency in the context of a technocratic central government instituted following an unexpected tragic event that forced the resignation of the previous government. Using a regression discontinuity method applied to mayoral races in Romania, I document that the control of local offices causally generated significant vote share premia in the 2016 parliamentary ballot - estimated at 10-11 percentage points, or roughly one fourth of the dependent variable’s mean. My results show that the affiliation of local incumbents can be consequential for parliamentary power absent a contemporaneous party alignment linking local and central governmental forces

The Local Political Economy of Austerity: Lessons from Hospital Closures in Romania

I study whether austerity measures implemented by a central government incentivize electorally-motivated policy adjustments at the local level. To do so, I first quantify the effects of a controversial 2011 health-sector reform carried out in Romania, whereby a significant proportion of the country’s public hospitals was discontinued. Exploiting geographic constituency-level variation in austerity exposure created by this measure, I document a significant increase in local "voter-friendly" government spending targeted towards infrastructure investments in the policy’s catchment areas. Consistent with an electoral mechanism explaining this response, the evidence suggests that the effect is driven by the actions of local politicians affiliated with those responsible for the reform. To rule out alternative explanations, I take advantage of a second natural experiment wherein a party previously in opposition to those responsible for the closure of hospitals allied itself with the measure’s principal orchestrator. Following this re-alignment, I find heterogeneous increases in local voter-friendly spending which further corroborate the electoral mechanism. Overall, my results indicate that the electorally-driven responses of sub-national governments may partially mitigate the political costs of carrying out austerity

The Three Meaningful Votes: Voting on Brexit in the British House of Commons

Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? To address this question, we leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative government had reached with the European Union. The bill was decisively defeated three times due to a major revolt amongst Conservative backbench Members of Parliament (MPs). We find that three factors influenced their rebellion calculus: the MP’s own ideological views, constituency preferences and career concerns. Somewhat paradoxically, the rebellion within the Conservative Party came from MPs who had supported Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum and from MPs elected in Leave leaning constituencies

On the origin of the reactor antineutrino anomalies in light of a new summation model with parameterized β−\beta^{-} transitions

We investigate the possible origins of the norm and shape reactor antineutrino anomalies in the framework of a summation model (SM) where $\beta^{-}$ transitions are simulated by a phenomenological Gamow-Teller $\beta$-decay strength model. The general trends of the discrepancies to the Huber-Mueller model on the antineutrino side can be reproduced both in norm and shape. From the exact electron-antineutrino correspondence of the SM model, we predict similar distortions in the electron spectra, suggesting that biases on the reference fission-electron spectra could be at the origin of the anomalies

Electromagnetic field in matter. Surface enhanced Raman scattering

The polarization and magnetization degrees of freedom are included in the general treatment of the electromagnetic field in matter, and their governing equations are given. Particular cases of solutions are discussed for polarizable, non-magnetic matter, including quasi-static fields, surface plasmons, propagation, zero-point fluctuations of the eigenmodes, especially for a semi-infinite homogeneous body (half-space). The van der Waals London-Casimir force acting between a neutral nano-particle and a half-space is computed and the response of this electromagnetically coupled system to an external field is given, with relevance for the surface enhanced Raman scattering