Alessandra Moresi

Research

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  Job Market Paper

  The Impact of the 2017 Women's March on Female Political Representation

  Awarded the 2023 Mixtape Fellowship, the 2024 prize for the best research paper in a doctoral dissertation from the Italian Society of Economics, and the 2025 Young Paper Award from the Renaissance in Economics Conference.

  Abstract

  Can female-led protests boost women's political participation? This paper examines the impact of the largest single-day progressive feminist protest in U.S. history. Using a difference-in-differences design based on proximity, I find that the protests increased conservative women's candidacy in Republican primaries, but this did not lead to electoral wins. Conversely, the Democratic Party was better able to coordinate women candidates, irrespective of distance to protests. These women ran and won in both the primaries and general elections, securing overall gains in the midterm elections and boosting female representation in Congress.

  PDF

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  Working paper

  Moral Characters: Social Media and U.S. Congressional Elections

  joint with Edoardo Grillo and Juan Morales

  Awarded the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada Insight Development Grant — 72,248 CAD.

  Abstract

  We study how politicians' adoption of social media, and the use of moral language, affect electoral returns. We compile a new dataset covering over 4,000 Twitter accounts and almost five million tweets by US House candidates over 2008-2018. We document several descriptive facts: social media use rises and falls with electoral cycles, politicians' use of moral rhetoric increased over the period of study, and moral rhetoric is strongly associated with higher social media engagement. Using a regression discontinuity design on close primary elections, we find that social media use by candidates has a positive but imprecisely estimated effect on vote shares. This effect is strongly heterogeneous depending on the use of moral rhetoric, and is large and statistically significant for candidates with above-median moral language use. A complementary design using only candidates with Twitter also reveals a causal effect of moral language on vote shares. We also document that relative to other social media features (negativity, out-group animosity, toxicity) moral rhetoric drives more positive engagement. Finally, we show that increased coverage from mainstream news media and campaign donations are important mechanisms.

  PDF CESifo Working Paper

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  Work in progress

  Leaking Democracy: Roe's Overturn and Political Participation

  joint with Flavia Cavallini and Chiara Santantonio

  Abstract

  This study examines the effect of an information shock concerning restrictions on women's bodily autonomy on their propensity to run for office. We exploit the unexpected timing of the leak of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and its interaction with the timing of primary filing deadlines across states. We document a significant decline in the probability that Republican women run in U.S. House primaries. An analysis of prediction-market data suggests that the expected probability of Republican women winning elections also declined significantly after the leak.

  Draft available upon request.

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  Work in progress

  Erasmus+ Mobility and Political Preferences

  joint with Ruben Durante, Luca Favero and Giovanni Mastrobuoni

  Abstract

  We exploit administrative rankings used by the mobility office at a large Italian university to study the causal effect of Erasmus+ mobility on political attitudes and behavior. We link administrative scores to data collected through telephone and computer assisted surveys measuring political outcomes and European identity.

  This project is co-funded by the NRRP (GRINS 8, PI Giovanni Mastrobuoni) and the ERC (POLARISE, PI Ruben Durante).

Curriculum Vitae

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Teaching

Conferences

References