Provision of most public goods (e.g., health care, libraries, education, police, fire protection, utilities) can be characterised by a two-stage production process. In the first stage, basic inputs (e.g., labour and capital) are used to generate service potential (e.g., opening hours,...

This paper analyzes the relation between different forms of civic engagement and corruption. This first of all extends earlier analysis linking generalized trust to corruption by incorporating another element from the social capital complex (namely formal forms of civic engagement). Second,...

Politicians often implement popular changes in public policies prior to elections, with the aim of improving their Election Day outcome. This research note evaluates whether such electioneering carries over also into politicians' extra-parliamentary activities. Evidence from the UK House of...

Countries differ in their governmental architectures and in the rules that describe the allocation of tasks, rights and duties across the various levels of government. In this paper, we present a short and selective survey of the development of the theory of optimal allocation of rights and...

Most work studying micro-processes of integration - i.e. how agents develop identities and decision-making behaviours within a particular institution - offers explanations based on either instrumental rationality or socialisation. This article proposes a twodimensional framework that allows...

Economic efficiency – understood in terms of jurisdictions providing a maximum amount of output for a given level of inputs – is one potential means to evaluate public policies. Various approaches, however, co-exist to measure the (technical) efficiency of organizations. Given that these...

Political parties are often argued to compete for voters by stressing issues they feel they own - a strategy known as 'selective emphasis'. While usually seen as an electorally rewarding strategy, this article argues that cultivating your themes in the public debate is not guaranteed to be...

Research linking civic engagement to citizens' democratic values, generalized trust, cooperative norms, and so on often implicitly assumes such connections are stable over time. This article argues that, due to changes in the broader institutional environment, the engagement-values relation is...

Members of parliament in many countries are legally permitted to execute (un)paid jobs in addition to their political mandate. It is often argued that such moonlighting activities are unproblematic for the chain of democratic delegation and accountability as long as outside interests/earnings...

Firms’ political donations can induce distortions in the allocation of public procurement contracts. In this article, we employ an advanced non-parametric efficiency model to study the public sector (cost) efficiency implications of such distortions. Using a unique dataset covering the Czech...