The author focuses on Communist Party-management relations in large and medium-scale Chinese industries since the early 1980s. Analysing these relations in the context of current economic and political reforms, he explores the major problems, the policies that have been pursued to resolve them,...

We use a change in the voting procedures of one of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament to explore how transparency affects the voting behavior of its members. Until 2013, the Council of States (Ständerat) had voted by a show of hands. While publicly observable at the time of the vote,...

In European Parliament elections turnout rates, traditionally lower than in national parliamentary elections, decrease from one elections to the next, and show strong variations within and between countries. What explains this decline? Why are there such big differences between and within the EU...

Voter turnout has declined in many industrialized countries, raising the question of whether electoral institutions increase voter turnout. We exploit an electoral reform in the Austrian state of Burgenland as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of opening hours of polling...

A recent paper by Madden used concentration indices to examine the bases of party support in Ireland in the 2011 election. This note updates this work to incorporate the 2016 election using the latest wave of ESS data. The results show that in terms of the bases of party supports many of the...

Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? We leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative...

We document a remarkable increase over the past two and a half decades in the fraction of people in England feeling close to no party - the rise of the "no party" - which, today, is close to constituting an absolute majority. We develop a new method to distinguish between age, period, and cohort...