Essays on the political economy of democracy[Essais d’économie politique de la démocratie]

This thesis seeks to advance our understanding of individual political behavior in Western democracies, through the construction and quantitative analysis of large historical databases.The first chapter examines the historical determinants of climate change beliefs in the United States. It shows that the progressive building, during the 19th and 20th centuries, of economic identities related to the oil & gas industry, today contributes to persistent levels of climate change denial.The second chapter investigates the drivers of individual political engagement, through the case of small campaign contributions. Building the first systematic database on the subject, we show that, during the 2006-2020 period in the U.S., small donors are on average more representative of the voting-age population than large donors, and that their behaviors differ significantly: they contribute to more visible, out-of-state candidates, and are more sensitive to campaign advertisements.The third chapter studies how campaign spending has influenced voting decisions over the last 160 years in the U.K.. It shows that, although the amounts spent on candidates' campaigns have decreased dramatically since 1880, the correlation between these expenditures and the votes they received has in fact increased, and that this is in part linked to the introduction of new information technologies (such as local radio and the Internet) and to changes in candidates' campaign strategies.