By examining voting behavior in a referendum on the construction of a concert hall in Germany, I show that political ideology influences cultural policy. The results suggest that resistance to the concert hall was particularly strong in electoral districts in which majorities of citizens vote...

Globalization is blamed for many socio-economic shortcomings. I discuss the consequences of globalization by surveying the empirical globalization literature. My focus is on the KOF indices of globalization (Dreher 2006a and Dreher et al. 2008a), that have been used in more than 100 studies....

Nach Ansicht von Niklas Potrafke wird durch die große Koalition die Staatstätigkeit kräftig ausweitet. Dieser sich abzeichnende Politikwechsel sei aber problematisch, da sich die Mehrheit der deutschen Wähler keinen größeren Einfluss des Staates gewünscht hätten.

Principal-agent problems can arise when preferences of voters are not aligned with preferences of political representatives. Often the consequence of the political principal-agent problem is political catering to special interests. In this paper I provide examples of principal-agent problems...

Eine Untersuchung der Minderheitsvoten im Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung im Zeitraum 19712011 zeigt, dass sich die von den Gewerkschaften nominierten Räte durch ihr Wahlverhalten zu vielen wirtschaftspolitischen Fragen anders als ihre Kollegen...

My empirical results in Potrafke (2012) confirm past conclusions that Muslim-majority countries are less likely to be democratic. Hanusch takes issue with my results - and by inference with all past empirical results on the relation between Islam and democracy. In his comment on my study,...

I investigate empirically the role of religion and political institutions in policies against human trafficking, using the new 3P Anti-trafficking Policy Index. The dataset contains 175 countries. The results show that governments in countries with Christian majorities implement stricter...