In ‘Perfecting Parliament’ Roger Congleton applies the rational choice framework to explain two attributes of the democratization of the West from the medieval times to the early twentieth century, first the shift of policy making authority from the king to the parliament and second the...

The paper analyses why office-motivated political rivals may agree to cease conflict to control the government and share power on the basis of an election outcome under proportional representation. As the outcomes of conflict and elections are uncertain, for each rational player the choice...

Legal philosophers like Montesquieu, Hegel and Tocqueville have argued that lay participation in judicial decision-making would have benefits reaching far beyond the realm of the legal system narrowly understood. From an economic point of view, lay participation in judicial decision-making can...

There is a well-established literature analyzing the effects of fiscal institutions on fiscal policy variables such as budget deficits or accumulated government debt. We combine this literature with the emerging field of positive constitutional economics, which deals with the economic effects of...

This is the first study that assesses the economic effects of differences in organizational design of supreme audit institutions (SAIs) on a cross-country basis. The effects on three groups of economic variables are estimated, namely on (1) fiscal policy, on (2) government effectiveness and...