the legal age of retirement in Switzerland, led to differences in approval rates of nearly seven percentage points. Based …

’s turnout, but has no effect on women. Females, however, vote more for the opponent and less for the incumbent when they are …

question is why are initiatives necessary in a representative democracy where candidates must already compete for the right to … control policy? This Paper offers one answer to this question. In a representative democracy, the bundling of issues, together …

and cannot be more easily financed by borrowing from the financial market. Democracy appears to affect the pace of reform …

there exists a distribution of resources such that democracy emerges in equilibrium, but there are distributions of … resources for which democracy is infeasible in equilibrium irrespective of the level of development. The model also delivers … results on the stability of democracy with regard to changes in the economic and demographic environment. The results are …

experience with immigration. At the same time, under the system of direct democracy, the Swiss electorate has voted regularly … with immigration policy and draws on the unique direct-democracy setting to bypass the problem of ‘hypothetical bias …

in a direct democracy framework. A median voter model is grafted on several variants of a specific-factor open …

), two-sector trade model to analyse the determinants of voter attitudes towards immigration under direct democracy and …

How does implementing harsh economic reforms influence voting behaviour? And how do the patterns of political support …-economic characteristics, such as age and education - tend to have a stable impact on voting behaviour over time, economic outcomes, such as …

We introduce tax contracts and examine how they affect government formation and welfare of voters in a democracy with …