Essays on the Political Economy of Voting and Money in Politics

The first chapter empirically tests the impact of terrorism and counter-terrorism on voting by focusing on the two 2015 general elections in Turkey, following the cancellation of the peace process and the resurgence of terror attacks. The impact of curfews and terror attacks on electoral outcomes are analysed in a difference-in-differences setting. Terror attacks are estimated to reduce the AKP's vote share by 3.2 percentage points while increasing the HDP's vote share by 3.6 percentage points. Curfews are estimated to cancel out the impact of terror attacks in attacked municipalities and decrease the AKP's vote share by 4.7 percentage points in non-attacked municipalities.

The second chapter investigates how elected members of the US House of Representatives from 107th to 116th congresses change their ideological positioning in response to campaign contributions. By using the contribution ratios to the Republican and Democrat congress members, the study classifies campaign contributions under three groups; "Democrat", "Republican" and "split-ticket" contributions. While "Republican" and "split-ticket" contributions have a negative impact on the ideology score of representatives, indicating that these types of contributions make representatives more liberal, or less right-wing, "Democrat" contributions affect it positively after accounting for electoral competition. Overall, money has a centripetal effect on congress members’ ideology.

The third chapter investigates the relationship between campaign contributions made by corporations and their financial returns over the period of 2000 to 2020 in the US using the data from Center for Responsive Politics and Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP). The findings reveal there is not a robust relationship between campaign contributions and corporate returns. When examining corporations that contribute solely to Republicans, for such corporations the estimated impact of campaign contributions is negatively correlated with cumulative returns. An additional $100,000 of contributions to solely Republicans is associated with 37.5% decrease in cumulative returns.