Toke Aidt

Electoral Effects of Distributional Policies

One of Toke Aidt’s ongoing projects studies distributional politics in the Republic of Georgia (jointly with Z. Asatryan and L. Badalyan). During the presidential election in 2018, a private foundation with connections to one of the main candidates enacted a very large debt relief program that affected every sixth voter. The project utilizes quasi-experimental variation to study the short and medium term electoral effects of this.

Mr. Aidt is also working on a book project that will examine the effects of the Great Reform Act of 1832 (jointly with R. Franck). In another current project (jointly with J. Lacroix and P.-G. Meon) he is examining how compromised French politicians avoided being banned from holding political and public offices in post-war France.

Toke Aidt’s area of research is Political Economics and Public Choice with a strong interest in economic history. He has made contributions to the literature on corruption and rent seeking, to the literature on environmental protection and tax policy, to the literature on the causes and consequences of democratization, and to the literature on foreign influence.

Toke Aidt (PhD from the University of Aarhus, Denmark) holds a Readership (associate professorship) at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, and he is a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He has worked at Cambridge since 1998. He is one of the Editors of the European Journal of Political Economy (2014-2022), serves on the editorial board of Public Choice and Constitutional Political Economy, and is a member of the Syndicate of Cambridge University Press. He is a past-president of the European Public Choice Society and was awarded the Wicksell Prize (1999) by the society for the best paper by a young scholar. His research has been supported by the UK research council and the British Academy. He is also a CESifo Research Network Fellow.