Democracy

In new research, Janka Deli analyzes the relationship between the decline in the rule of law and trade. Contrary to democratic and developmental theory, she finds that declines in the rule of law, as seen in Hungary, Poland, and Czechia, do not lead to systematic reductions in trade with other EU partners.  

Julia Cagé, Caroline Le Pennec, and Elisa Mougin discuss their recent research on France’s 1995 ban on corporate contributions to political campaigns. The ban pushed candidates to de-emphasize local politics in favor of national issues and, in many cases, adopt more extreme rhetoric.

In new research, Alexander Furnas, Timothy LaPira, and Clare Brock find that most politically active organizations engage in either campaign contributions or lobbying, but rarely both.The findings have implications for regulation and future academic research.

The following is an excerpt from “The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling into Disorder" by Eswar Prasad," now out at Hachette Book Group.

In new research providing the first systematic evidence on public notices, Kimberlyn Munevar, Anya Nakhmurina, and Delphine Samuels examine how Florida's 2023 law allowing local governments to stop publishing public notices in newspapers has affected citizen engagement in local governance.

The Trump administration’s blacklist of Anthropic represents its greatest attack on free markets yet. America’s businesses must push back, writes Luigi Zingales.

In the second of two articles, Stavros Makris and Filip Lubinski discuss how governments can reimagine competition policy to protect democracy and citizen welfare without abandoning traditional consumer welfare goals like innovation.

In the first of two articles, Stavros Makris and Filip Lubinski discuss the connection between economic competition and democracy and how competition law allowed Big Tech to undermine both.

Smartphones have become a primary gateway for consuming political news, but we know little about what individuals actually see on their phones. In new research, Guy Aridor, Tevel Dekel, Rafael Jiménez Durán, Ro’ee Levy, and Lena Song open the smartphone black box using novel content data and document individuals’ exposure to election-related content during the 2024 presidential election, as well as the drivers of this exposure.

Mihir Kshirsagar argues that the evidence presented in FTC v. Meta shows that discussions about the application of First Amendment protections to social media must go beyond the binary set in Moody v. NetChoice between treating them as common carriers or editorial agents. Rather, a commercial conduct framework is needed to understand how speech operates on platforms designed to maximize user attention and ad revenue.