This paper examines the importance of electoral rules for legislators' behavior. The German electoral system includes a mechanism which assigns whether legislators are elected under the "first-past-the-post" (FPTP), or the proportional representation (PR) electoral rule. Using this institution,...

In the political science and public choice literature, it has been shown that candidates (i) deviate from their median voter based upon the primary election type, and (ii) are more likely to establish policy positions that deviate from the median voter when the voting system is characterized by...

The adoption of mandatory gender quotas in party lists has been a subject of discussion in many countries. Since any reform obviously requires the approval of a (sometimes qualified) majority of incumbent legislators' votes, keeping an eye on incumbents' interests and incentives in different...

How do interest groups choose across different venues of lobbying to influence policy? Why do some interest groups lobby politicians and others lobby bureaucrats? In contrast to the existing approaches that view lobbying as one-sided action by organized interest in an effort to influence a...

This paper presents a new data set on electoral systems and outlines its potential uses in further research exploring the connections between electoral systems and economic outcomes. The data set provides indicators of the degree to which individual politicians can further their careers by...

We study how electoral systems affect the presence of women in politics using a model in which both voters and parties might have a gender bias. We apply the model to Spanish municipal elections, in which national law mandates that municipalities follow one of two different electoral systems: a...

Primary elections in the United States have been under-studied in the political science literature. Using new data to estimate the ideal points of primary election candidates and constituents, we examine the link between the ideological leanings of primary electorates and the ideological...