Political Institutions Projects:

Working paper: Superti, Chiara. Vertical Contamination. The Puzzling case of Local Italian MPs. Current Version available: here. ABSTRACT:  Electoral systems affect the type of candidates who are more likely to receive votes in different electoral contexts. Parties make their strategic choices based on this, but sometimes experience a ‘contamination’ of their candidate-selection strategies due to the influence of electoral institutions in place in different electoral tiers. Minority representation at the local level is not purely the consequence of electoral rules, but of the interaction between these rules and electoral institutions in place at different tiers. This paper demonstrates the existence of ‘vertical contamination’ in the process of candidate selection, from the national to the subnational elections. It tracks the trends of representation for women in the Italian local legislative bodies (i.e. regional and provincial) and shows how these trends unexpectedly mirror the changes in the national Parliament, mainly for national and centralized parties. This happens despite the different incentive structures in place at each electoral tier.

Working project: Grimmer, Justin, Gary King, and Chiara Superti. You Lie! Patterns of Partisan Taunting in the U.S. Senate,  2014. In progress. Abstract and poster presented at PolMeth 2014 available here: POSTER. ABSTRACT: This is a poster that describes our analysis of "partisan taunting," the explicit, public, and negative attacks on another political party or its members, usually using vitriolic and derogatory language. We first demonstrate that most projects that hand code text in the social sciences optimize with respect to the wrong criterion, resulting in large, unnecessary biases. We show how to fix this problem and then apply it to taunting. We find empirically that, unlike most claims in the press and the literature, taunting is not inexorably increasing; it appears instead to be a rational political strategy, most often used by those least likely to win by traditional means -- ideological extremists, out-party members when the president is unpopular, and minority party members. However, although taunting appears to be individually rational, it is collectively irrational: Constituents may resonate with one cutting taunt by their Senator, but they might not approve if he or she were devoting large amounts of time to this behavior rather than say trying to solve important national problems. We hope to partially rectify this situation by posting public rankings of Senatorial taunting behavior. A methodological spin-off project has been developed in a separate paper:  "The Unreliability of Measures of Intercoder Reliability, and What to do About it" here
Published Paper: Superti, Chiara. "Focus on the North: Between Old Proposals and New Protests", in  Italy and Europe at the Crossroad of Reforms. The European and Local Elections of May 25th 2014, edited by Marco Valbruzzi and Rinaldo Vignati, Carlo Cattaneo, 2014. Available here in Italian only.