Simon Weschle
Biographic Data
| ID | 1097272 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Weschle |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon |
| FAMILY NAME | Weschle |
| SIGNATURE | WESCHLE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Syracuse University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5106-5301 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 280 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The super rich and the rest
We provide a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of the relationship between campaign finance pressures and the wealth of politicians. We argue that the heavily right‐skewed wealth distributions observed in contemporary societies translate into similarly skewed distributions of campaign resources. Such unequal resources mean that greater pressures to spend on campaigns disproportionately benefit the very wealthy. We also identify seve…
Does political sophistication moderate how citizens use information to infer left-right distances between parties
What drives perceptions of partisan cooperation
What drives voters' perceptions of partisan cooperation? In this note, we investigate whether voters have accurate beliefs about which parties regularly cooperate with one another, and whether these beliefs follow the real-time portrait of cooperation and conflict between parties that is reported in the news. We combine original survey data of voters' perceptions of party cooperation in four countries over two time periods with a measure of parti…
Politicians’ Private Sector Jobs and Parliamentary Behavior
About 80% of democracies allow legislators to be employed in the private sector while they hold office. However, we know little about the consequences of this practice. In this article, I use newly assembled panel data of all members of the United Kingdom House of Commons and a difference‐in‐differences design to investigate how legislators change their parliamentary behavior when they have outside earnings. When holding a private sector job, mem…
Money in Politics
Parliamentary Positions and Politicians’ Private Sector Earnings
Most democracies allow their members of parliament to concurrently be employed in the private sector. A widespread worry is that politicians leverage their current or past posts within parliament, for example, as ministers or committee chairs, to gain lucrative jobs. However, we know little about whether "moonlighting" income is indeed driven by these positions. I analyze comprehensive new panel data on the private sector earnings of all members …
Campaign finance legislation and the supply-side of the revolving door
Existing research on the revolving door examines why employers hire former politicians. I complement this demand-side approach by demonstrating the importance of the supply-side. In particular, I argue that one important institutional factor that shapes politicians' willingness to leave office for a private sector job is campaign finance legislation. Less restrictive rules increase campaign spending for incumbents, which makes revolving door empl…
Elite Interactions and Voters’ Perceptions of Parties’ Policy Positions
Recent research documents that voters infer that governing coalition partners share similar ideologies, independently of these parties’ actual policy statements. We argue that citizens estimate party positions from more general forms of interparty cooperation and conflict, particularly near the times of national elections. We analyze tens of thousands of media reports on elite interactions from 13 Western democracies between 2001 and 2014, and sh…
The Impact of Economic Crises on Political Representation in Public Communication
External threats such as war have been shown to disrupt representation as politicians ‘put politics aside’ and cooperate across cleavages. This article examines whether a severe economic crisis can have a similar effect. It introduces a new approach that provides a spatial representation of how political parties represent societal actors in their public interactions, based on more than 140,000 machine coded news events from eleven eurozone countr…
Assessing the Impact of Non-Random Measurement Error on Inference
Many commonly used data sources in the social sciences suffer from non-random measurement error, understood as mis-measurement of a variable that is systematically related to another variable. We argue that studies relying on potentially suspect data should take the threat this poses to inference seriously and address it routinely in a principled manner. In this article, we aid researchers in this task by introducing a sensitivity analysis approa…
Quantifying Political Relationships
In this article, I introduce a method that uses large-scale event data and latent factor network models to provide a new comparative measure of cooperation and conflict in public relationships among politicians, nonpartisan political actors, and societal actors. The approach has a number of advantages over existing techniques: It captures public relationships in a multitude of venues on a continuous basis, incorporates both partisan and nonpartis…
Punishing personal and electoral corruption
A growing literature examines the effect of corruption on political behavior. However, little attention has been paid so far to the fact that politicians engage in it for various reasons and with different welfare consequences. In this article, I argue that voters judge corrupt politicians differently depending on what the money is used for. I show results from a survey experiment in India in which respondents heard about a politician who accepte…
Two types of economic voting
Antigovernment Networks in Civil Conflicts
In this article, we combine a game‐theoretic treatment of public goods provision in networks with a statistical network analysis to show that fragmented opposition network structures lead to an increase in conflictual actions. Current literature concentrates on the dyadic relationship between the government and potential challengers. We shift the focus toward exploring how network structures affect the strategic behavior of political actors. We d…
Attitudes towards redistributive spending in an era of demographic ageing
This article is about the relative impact of age and income on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies; that is, the extent to which the intergenerational conflict supercedes or complements intragenerational conflicts. On the basis of a multivariate statistical analysis of the 1996 ISSP Role of Government Data Set for 14 OECD countries, we find considerable age-related differences in welfare state pr…
Attitudes Towards Redistributive Spending in an Era of Demographic Aging
Attitudes towards redistributive spending in an era of demographic ageing
This article is about the relative impact of age and income on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies; that is, the extent to which the intergenerational conflict supercedes or complements intragenerational conflicts. On the basis of a multivariate statistical analysis of the 1996 ISSP Role of Government Data Set for 14 OECD countries, we find considerable age-related differences in welfare state pr…
Antigovernment Networks in Civil Conflicts
In this article, we combine a game‐theoretic treatment of public goods provision in networks with a statistical network analysis to show that fragmented opposition network structures lead to an increase in conflictual actions. Current literature concentrates on the dyadic relationship between the government and potential challengers. We shift the focus toward exploring how network structures affect the strategic behavior of political actors. We d…
Elite Interactions and Voters’ Perceptions of Parties’ Policy Positions
Recent research documents that voters infer that governing coalition partners share similar ideologies, independently of these parties’ actual policy statements. We argue that citizens estimate party positions from more general forms of interparty cooperation and conflict, particularly near the times of national elections. We analyze tens of thousands of media reports on elite interactions from 13 Western democracies between 2001 and 2014, and sh…
Two types of economic voting
Parliamentary Positions and Politicians’ Private Sector Earnings
Most democracies allow their members of parliament to concurrently be employed in the private sector. A widespread worry is that politicians leverage their current or past posts within parliament, for example, as ministers or committee chairs, to gain lucrative jobs. However, we know little about whether "moonlighting" income is indeed driven by these positions. I analyze comprehensive new panel data on the private sector earnings of all members …
Assessing the Impact of Non-Random Measurement Error on Inference
Many commonly used data sources in the social sciences suffer from non-random measurement error, understood as mis-measurement of a variable that is systematically related to another variable. We argue that studies relying on potentially suspect data should take the threat this poses to inference seriously and address it routinely in a principled manner. In this article, we aid researchers in this task by introducing a sensitivity analysis approa…
Quantifying Political Relationships
In this article, I introduce a method that uses large-scale event data and latent factor network models to provide a new comparative measure of cooperation and conflict in public relationships among politicians, nonpartisan political actors, and societal actors. The approach has a number of advantages over existing techniques: It captures public relationships in a multitude of venues on a continuous basis, incorporates both partisan and nonpartis…
Politicians’ Private Sector Jobs and Parliamentary Behavior
About 80% of democracies allow legislators to be employed in the private sector while they hold office. However, we know little about the consequences of this practice. In this article, I use newly assembled panel data of all members of the United Kingdom House of Commons and a difference‐in‐differences design to investigate how legislators change their parliamentary behavior when they have outside earnings. When holding a private sector job, mem…
Campaign finance legislation and the supply-side of the revolving door
Existing research on the revolving door examines why employers hire former politicians. I complement this demand-side approach by demonstrating the importance of the supply-side. In particular, I argue that one important institutional factor that shapes politicians' willingness to leave office for a private sector job is campaign finance legislation. Less restrictive rules increase campaign spending for incumbents, which makes revolving door empl…
The Impact of Economic Crises on Political Representation in Public Communication
External threats such as war have been shown to disrupt representation as politicians ‘put politics aside’ and cooperate across cleavages. This article examines whether a severe economic crisis can have a similar effect. It introduces a new approach that provides a spatial representation of how political parties represent societal actors in their public interactions, based on more than 140,000 machine coded news events from eleven eurozone countr…
Punishing personal and electoral corruption
A growing literature examines the effect of corruption on political behavior. However, little attention has been paid so far to the fact that politicians engage in it for various reasons and with different welfare consequences. In this article, I argue that voters judge corrupt politicians differently depending on what the money is used for. I show results from a survey experiment in India in which respondents heard about a politician who accepte…
What drives perceptions of partisan cooperation
What drives voters' perceptions of partisan cooperation? In this note, we investigate whether voters have accurate beliefs about which parties regularly cooperate with one another, and whether these beliefs follow the real-time portrait of cooperation and conflict between parties that is reported in the news. We combine original survey data of voters' perceptions of party cooperation in four countries over two time periods with a measure of parti…
The super rich and the rest
We provide a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of the relationship between campaign finance pressures and the wealth of politicians. We argue that the heavily right‐skewed wealth distributions observed in contemporary societies translate into similarly skewed distributions of campaign resources. Such unequal resources mean that greater pressures to spend on campaigns disproportionately benefit the very wealthy. We also identify seve…
Does political sophistication moderate how citizens use information to infer left-right distances between parties
Attitudes Towards Redistributive Spending in an Era of Demographic Aging
Attitudes towards redistributive spending in an era of demographic ageing
This article is about the relative impact of age and income on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies; that is, the extent to which the intergenerational conflict supercedes or complements intragenerational conflicts. On the basis of a multivariate statistical analysis of the 1996 ISSP Role of Government Data Set for 14 OECD countries, we find considerable age-related differences in welfare state pr…
Antigovernment Networks in Civil Conflicts
In this article, we combine a game‐theoretic treatment of public goods provision in networks with a statistical network analysis to show that fragmented opposition network structures lead to an increase in conflictual actions. Current literature concentrates on the dyadic relationship between the government and potential challengers. We shift the focus toward exploring how network structures affect the strategic behavior of political actors. We d…
Two types of economic voting
Punishing personal and electoral corruption
A growing literature examines the effect of corruption on political behavior. However, little attention has been paid so far to the fact that politicians engage in it for various reasons and with different welfare consequences. In this article, I argue that voters judge corrupt politicians differently depending on what the money is used for. I show results from a survey experiment in India in which respondents heard about a politician who accepte…
Quantifying Political Relationships
In this article, I introduce a method that uses large-scale event data and latent factor network models to provide a new comparative measure of cooperation and conflict in public relationships among politicians, nonpartisan political actors, and societal actors. The approach has a number of advantages over existing techniques: It captures public relationships in a multitude of venues on a continuous basis, incorporates both partisan and nonpartis…
The Impact of Economic Crises on Political Representation in Public Communication
External threats such as war have been shown to disrupt representation as politicians ‘put politics aside’ and cooperate across cleavages. This article examines whether a severe economic crisis can have a similar effect. It introduces a new approach that provides a spatial representation of how political parties represent societal actors in their public interactions, based on more than 140,000 machine coded news events from eleven eurozone countr…
Assessing the Impact of Non-Random Measurement Error on Inference
Many commonly used data sources in the social sciences suffer from non-random measurement error, understood as mis-measurement of a variable that is systematically related to another variable. We argue that studies relying on potentially suspect data should take the threat this poses to inference seriously and address it routinely in a principled manner. In this article, we aid researchers in this task by introducing a sensitivity analysis approa…
Parliamentary Positions and Politicians’ Private Sector Earnings
Most democracies allow their members of parliament to concurrently be employed in the private sector. A widespread worry is that politicians leverage their current or past posts within parliament, for example, as ministers or committee chairs, to gain lucrative jobs. However, we know little about whether "moonlighting" income is indeed driven by these positions. I analyze comprehensive new panel data on the private sector earnings of all members …
Campaign finance legislation and the supply-side of the revolving door
Existing research on the revolving door examines why employers hire former politicians. I complement this demand-side approach by demonstrating the importance of the supply-side. In particular, I argue that one important institutional factor that shapes politicians' willingness to leave office for a private sector job is campaign finance legislation. Less restrictive rules increase campaign spending for incumbents, which makes revolving door empl…
Elite Interactions and Voters’ Perceptions of Parties’ Policy Positions
Recent research documents that voters infer that governing coalition partners share similar ideologies, independently of these parties’ actual policy statements. We argue that citizens estimate party positions from more general forms of interparty cooperation and conflict, particularly near the times of national elections. We analyze tens of thousands of media reports on elite interactions from 13 Western democracies between 2001 and 2014, and sh…
Money in Politics
What drives perceptions of partisan cooperation
What drives voters' perceptions of partisan cooperation? In this note, we investigate whether voters have accurate beliefs about which parties regularly cooperate with one another, and whether these beliefs follow the real-time portrait of cooperation and conflict between parties that is reported in the news. We combine original survey data of voters' perceptions of party cooperation in four countries over two time periods with a measure of parti…
Politicians’ Private Sector Jobs and Parliamentary Behavior
About 80% of democracies allow legislators to be employed in the private sector while they hold office. However, we know little about the consequences of this practice. In this article, I use newly assembled panel data of all members of the United Kingdom House of Commons and a difference‐in‐differences design to investigate how legislators change their parliamentary behavior when they have outside earnings. When holding a private sector job, mem…
The super rich and the rest
We provide a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of the relationship between campaign finance pressures and the wealth of politicians. We argue that the heavily right‐skewed wealth distributions observed in contemporary societies translate into similarly skewed distributions of campaign resources. Such unequal resources mean that greater pressures to spend on campaigns disproportionately benefit the very wealthy. We also identify seve…
Does political sophistication moderate how citizens use information to infer left-right distances between parties
Political science (14 works) · Economics (11 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Political economy (5 works) · Social Media and Politics (5 works)