Konstantinos Matakos
Biographic Data
| ID | 1323939 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Konstantinos Matakos |
| GIVEN NAMES | Konstantinos |
| FAMILY NAME | Matakos |
| SIGNATURE | MATAKOS K |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3511-197X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 416 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
All the “Missing” ladies: Attribution bias in candidate selection after electoral setbacks
Humanitarian Concerns and Acceptance of Syrian Refugees in Turkey
Do humanitarian concerns increase support for hosting refugees? Evidence from Western democracies suggests they do, but do they matter elsewhere? We theorize that humanitarian motivations—concern for torture victims—make host societies more willing to welcome refugees regardless of background. Based on a conjoint experiment in Turkey (N = 2,362), Syrian refugee profiles indicating torture receive higher support than otherwise-similar profiles wit…
Recurring labour market shocks and stated and revealed preferences for redistribution
Diversity without Adversity? Ethnic Bias toward Refugees in a Co-Religious Society
What shapes the host population’s willingness to accept refugees into social, economic, and political life in their country? We argue that refugees’ ethnicity plays a key role—both directly and indirectly—in shaping support for having refugees as neighbors and for granting them a work permit or citizenship. Fielding a conjoint experiment in Turkey (N = 2,362), we find that locals discriminate against Syrian Arab and Kurdish refugees compared to T…
Control and Fairness: What Determines Elected Local Leaders’ Support for Hosting Refugees in Their Community
When it comes to successful refugee reception, the local level matters. Research overwhelmingly examines host communities' attitudes, but endorsement from local politicians is equally important to resolving conflicts and facilitating harmonious interaction. Yet the preferences of local leaders and their willingness to support the resettlement process are understudied. We conduct the first-ever conjoint experiment on a representative sample of loc…
“Dragon boating” alone? Community ties and systemic income shocks
Can social capital effectively cushion households against adverse income shocks, especially in the absence of formal insurance mechanisms in developing countries? And what if such shocks are due international finance and thus universal and systemic in nature? We analyse whether participation in formal and informal community activities (our measure of social capital) helped households in Indonesia mitigating the impact of the 1998 financial crisis…
Class versus Identity: Candidates’ Race and the Inequality–Redistribution Nexus
Despite what the theory predicts, supply of redistributive policies does not always respond to rising inequality. We argue that redistribution reacts to changes in inequality, as long as the economy is not overshadowed by non-economic issues during the elections. To this end we construct a unique data set — where we estimate the race of candidates competing in all elections for U.S. state legislatures since 1980 — and show that the share of racia…
Electoral Spillovers in an Intertwined World: Brexit Effects on the 2016 Spanish Vote
The Brexit vote took place three days before the June 26, 2016, Spain’s parliamentary elections, in which anti-systemic parties performed worse compared to the previous elections (December 2015) despite the optimistic predictions of the pre-election polls and the surge in the support for anti-systemic parties that was taking place elsewhere (Hobolt and de Vries 2016). We split the Spanish votes in local ones (casted after Brexit) and postal ones …
Waking Up the Golden Dawn: Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Increase Support for Extreme-Right Parties
Does exposure to the refugee crisis fuel support for extreme-right parties? Despite heated debates about the political repercussions of the refugee crisis in Europe, there exists very little—and sometimes conflicting—evidence with which to assess the impact of a large influx of refugees on natives’ political attitudes and behavior. We provide causal evidence from a natural experiment in Greece, where some Aegean islands close to the Turkish borde…
Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile
Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives' attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did…
When extremes meet: Redistribution in a multiparty model with differentiated parties
In this paper we consider a multi-party electoral competition model in which parties, which care both about implemented policy and their electoral performance, strategically promise a redistribution scheme while their social ideologies are considered to be known and fixed (differentiated parties). Voters, who differ both in income and in social ideologies, vote sincerely for the party that they cumulatively like the most (that is, taking into acc…
Election note: The September 20, 2015 parliamentary election in Greece
Presidential traits (i.e. morality, intelligence, leadership) have generally been assumed to be idiosyncratic personal characteristics of the individual and are treated as exogenous from other political and economic factors. Prior literature has shown that presidential characteristics and economic performance are important elements of vote choice and approval. Using ANES data from 1984 to 2008, we demonstrate an important link between these facto…
Citizens or Clients? Evidence on Opportunistic Voting from a Natural Experiment in Greece
We exploit the act of the conservative Greek government (2004–2009) to fiddle the books as a natural experiment in order to document a causal link between government spending and electoral fragmentation and identify the mechanism via which it operates. The retrospective revision of Greece’s deficit figures just before the 2010 regional elections constituted an information shock, which generated expectations for reduced pork-barrel spending. We de…
Electoral Rule Disproportionality and Platform Polarization
Despite common perception, existing theoretical literature lacks a complete formal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization. In this article, we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard Downsian electoral competition setup with mainly, but not necessarily purely, policy‐motivated parties. We first show that in equilibrium, platfo…
Strategic electoral rule choice under uncertainty
We study electoral rule choice in a multi-party model with office-motivated parties and electoral outcome uncertainty. We show that when all dominant parties (parties with positive probability of winning the election) have sufficiently good chances of winning, they agree to switch from the PR rule to a more majoritarian one in order to increase their chances of forming a single-party government. We identify the exact degree of disproportionality …
Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile
Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives' attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did…
Waking Up the Golden Dawn: Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Increase Support for Extreme-Right Parties
Does exposure to the refugee crisis fuel support for extreme-right parties? Despite heated debates about the political repercussions of the refugee crisis in Europe, there exists very little—and sometimes conflicting—evidence with which to assess the impact of a large influx of refugees on natives’ political attitudes and behavior. We provide causal evidence from a natural experiment in Greece, where some Aegean islands close to the Turkish borde…
Electoral Rule Disproportionality and Platform Polarization
Despite common perception, existing theoretical literature lacks a complete formal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization. In this article, we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard Downsian electoral competition setup with mainly, but not necessarily purely, policy‐motivated parties. We first show that in equilibrium, platfo…
Electoral Spillovers in an Intertwined World: Brexit Effects on the 2016 Spanish Vote
The Brexit vote took place three days before the June 26, 2016, Spain’s parliamentary elections, in which anti-systemic parties performed worse compared to the previous elections (December 2015) despite the optimistic predictions of the pre-election polls and the surge in the support for anti-systemic parties that was taking place elsewhere (Hobolt and de Vries 2016). We split the Spanish votes in local ones (casted after Brexit) and postal ones …
Diversity without Adversity? Ethnic Bias toward Refugees in a Co-Religious Society
What shapes the host population’s willingness to accept refugees into social, economic, and political life in their country? We argue that refugees’ ethnicity plays a key role—both directly and indirectly—in shaping support for having refugees as neighbors and for granting them a work permit or citizenship. Fielding a conjoint experiment in Turkey (N = 2,362), we find that locals discriminate against Syrian Arab and Kurdish refugees compared to T…
Strategic electoral rule choice under uncertainty
We study electoral rule choice in a multi-party model with office-motivated parties and electoral outcome uncertainty. We show that when all dominant parties (parties with positive probability of winning the election) have sufficiently good chances of winning, they agree to switch from the PR rule to a more majoritarian one in order to increase their chances of forming a single-party government. We identify the exact degree of disproportionality …
Citizens or Clients? Evidence on Opportunistic Voting from a Natural Experiment in Greece
We exploit the act of the conservative Greek government (2004–2009) to fiddle the books as a natural experiment in order to document a causal link between government spending and electoral fragmentation and identify the mechanism via which it operates. The retrospective revision of Greece’s deficit figures just before the 2010 regional elections constituted an information shock, which generated expectations for reduced pork-barrel spending. We de…
Control and Fairness: What Determines Elected Local Leaders’ Support for Hosting Refugees in Their Community
When it comes to successful refugee reception, the local level matters. Research overwhelmingly examines host communities' attitudes, but endorsement from local politicians is equally important to resolving conflicts and facilitating harmonious interaction. Yet the preferences of local leaders and their willingness to support the resettlement process are understudied. We conduct the first-ever conjoint experiment on a representative sample of loc…
Strategic electoral rule choice under uncertainty
We study electoral rule choice in a multi-party model with office-motivated parties and electoral outcome uncertainty. We show that when all dominant parties (parties with positive probability of winning the election) have sufficiently good chances of winning, they agree to switch from the PR rule to a more majoritarian one in order to increase their chances of forming a single-party government. We identify the exact degree of disproportionality …
Election note: The September 20, 2015 parliamentary election in Greece
Presidential traits (i.e. morality, intelligence, leadership) have generally been assumed to be idiosyncratic personal characteristics of the individual and are treated as exogenous from other political and economic factors. Prior literature has shown that presidential characteristics and economic performance are important elements of vote choice and approval. Using ANES data from 1984 to 2008, we demonstrate an important link between these facto…
Citizens or Clients? Evidence on Opportunistic Voting from a Natural Experiment in Greece
We exploit the act of the conservative Greek government (2004–2009) to fiddle the books as a natural experiment in order to document a causal link between government spending and electoral fragmentation and identify the mechanism via which it operates. The retrospective revision of Greece’s deficit figures just before the 2010 regional elections constituted an information shock, which generated expectations for reduced pork-barrel spending. We de…
Electoral Rule Disproportionality and Platform Polarization
Despite common perception, existing theoretical literature lacks a complete formal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization. In this article, we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard Downsian electoral competition setup with mainly, but not necessarily purely, policy‐motivated parties. We first show that in equilibrium, platfo…
When extremes meet: Redistribution in a multiparty model with differentiated parties
In this paper we consider a multi-party electoral competition model in which parties, which care both about implemented policy and their electoral performance, strategically promise a redistribution scheme while their social ideologies are considered to be known and fixed (differentiated parties). Voters, who differ both in income and in social ideologies, vote sincerely for the party that they cumulatively like the most (that is, taking into acc…
Waking Up the Golden Dawn: Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Increase Support for Extreme-Right Parties
Does exposure to the refugee crisis fuel support for extreme-right parties? Despite heated debates about the political repercussions of the refugee crisis in Europe, there exists very little—and sometimes conflicting—evidence with which to assess the impact of a large influx of refugees on natives’ political attitudes and behavior. We provide causal evidence from a natural experiment in Greece, where some Aegean islands close to the Turkish borde…
Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile
Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives' attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did…
Class versus Identity: Candidates’ Race and the Inequality–Redistribution Nexus
Despite what the theory predicts, supply of redistributive policies does not always respond to rising inequality. We argue that redistribution reacts to changes in inequality, as long as the economy is not overshadowed by non-economic issues during the elections. To this end we construct a unique data set — where we estimate the race of candidates competing in all elections for U.S. state legislatures since 1980 — and show that the share of racia…
Electoral Spillovers in an Intertwined World: Brexit Effects on the 2016 Spanish Vote
The Brexit vote took place three days before the June 26, 2016, Spain’s parliamentary elections, in which anti-systemic parties performed worse compared to the previous elections (December 2015) despite the optimistic predictions of the pre-election polls and the surge in the support for anti-systemic parties that was taking place elsewhere (Hobolt and de Vries 2016). We split the Spanish votes in local ones (casted after Brexit) and postal ones …
“Dragon boating” alone? Community ties and systemic income shocks
Can social capital effectively cushion households against adverse income shocks, especially in the absence of formal insurance mechanisms in developing countries? And what if such shocks are due international finance and thus universal and systemic in nature? We analyse whether participation in formal and informal community activities (our measure of social capital) helped households in Indonesia mitigating the impact of the 1998 financial crisis…
Control and Fairness: What Determines Elected Local Leaders’ Support for Hosting Refugees in Their Community
When it comes to successful refugee reception, the local level matters. Research overwhelmingly examines host communities' attitudes, but endorsement from local politicians is equally important to resolving conflicts and facilitating harmonious interaction. Yet the preferences of local leaders and their willingness to support the resettlement process are understudied. We conduct the first-ever conjoint experiment on a representative sample of loc…
Diversity without Adversity? Ethnic Bias toward Refugees in a Co-Religious Society
What shapes the host population’s willingness to accept refugees into social, economic, and political life in their country? We argue that refugees’ ethnicity plays a key role—both directly and indirectly—in shaping support for having refugees as neighbors and for granting them a work permit or citizenship. Fielding a conjoint experiment in Turkey (N = 2,362), we find that locals discriminate against Syrian Arab and Kurdish refugees compared to T…
Humanitarian Concerns and Acceptance of Syrian Refugees in Turkey
Do humanitarian concerns increase support for hosting refugees? Evidence from Western democracies suggests they do, but do they matter elsewhere? We theorize that humanitarian motivations—concern for torture victims—make host societies more willing to welcome refugees regardless of background. Based on a conjoint experiment in Turkey (N = 2,362), Syrian refugee profiles indicating torture receive higher support than otherwise-similar profiles wit…
Recurring labour market shocks and stated and revealed preferences for redistribution
All the “Missing” ladies: Attribution bias in candidate selection after electoral setbacks
Political science (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (5 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (5 works) · Political economy (5 works) · Refugee (5 works) · Demographic economics (4 works)