Do citizens legislate different tax policies than parliaments? We provide quasi-experimental evidence for causal effects of direct democracy. Town meetings (popular assemblies) replace local councils in small German municipalities below a specific population threshold. Difference-in-differences,...

Why are some of the most important legal questions in our society — like the legal status of gay marriage, the right to unionize, the limits of campaign finance, the extent to which firearms can be regulated, abortion, and the outcome of a presidential election — decided by a bare majority...

We study the electoral impact of biased endorsements in large Poisson elections with two candidates. Under fairly general conditions, we derive analytical approximations for the asymptotic voting equilibria. We show that, when the electorate is sufficiently polarized, manipulating public...

This paper examines the effect of political favoritism on economic inequality in the short run and political polarization in the long run. We exploit the sudden death of an authoritarian leader - President Chiang Ching-Kuo of Taiwan - in 1988 to generate plausibly exogenous variation in...

The majoritarian parliamentary electoral system of Canada has been in existence in the same form since the founding of the modern state in 1867. It has been under attack at various levels of government and in the press periodically over the past two decades or so and has not often been defended....

Despite multiple opportunities to address the issue, the Supreme Court has declined to take action on partisan gerrymandering. Here we argue that the Court has successfully laid out several intellectual paths toward effective regulation - but that the best route for applying such reasoning goes...

Party platforms are important. They signal what matters for political parties and with whom parties are engaging. Platforms can be used to predict government behavior and are an important tool to hold a government to account. In the 2019 federal election, all the major parties released platform...

We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures that there is always at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors from...

This paper exploits an original database that spans 30-plus developed and developing nations between 1870 and 2010 to perform the first empirical analysis of the relationship between historical levels of intra-elite competition and fiscal development over the long run. We argue that the timing...

We review a decade of literature on clientelism, a central topic in the study of developing democracies. We define clientelism as the discretionary distribution of public resources by politicians. We distinguish clientelism that occurs in the pre-electoral period (electoral clientelism) from...

Personal freedom is highly valued by many and a central element of liberal political philosophy. Although personal freedom is frequently associated with electoral democracy, developments in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Russia, where elected populist leaders with authoritarian...

Personal freedom is highly valued by many and a central element of liberal political philosophy. Although personal freedom is frequently associated with electoral democracy, developments in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Russia, where elected populist leaders with authoritarian...

The purpose of this paper is to consider the determinants of state capacity investments and public finance in societies with different intensities of democracy. Specifically, we consider the implications of political (dis)parity between the political parties as well as voter groups for state...

The German two-vote election system implements two historical conceptions of political representation coined at the end of the 18th century during the American and French Revolutions. The descriptive conception - the parliament portrays the society in miniature - is implemented in the first vote...

Currently, only China has a parliament larger than the German Bundestag, which continues to grow due to the increasing number of overhang mandates. In 2016, Norbert Lammert, then president of the Bundestag, proposed to restrict it to 630 members by allocating mandates according to quotas for...

Recent developments in information and communication technologies allow candidates for office to engage in sophisticated messaging strategies to influence voter choice. We consider how access to different technologies influence the choice of policy platforms by candidates. We find that when...

We assess the influence of moneyed interests on legislative decisions. Our theory predicts that the vote outcome distribution and donation flows in a legislature feature a discontinuity at the approval threshold of bills if special interest groups are involved in vote buying. Testing the...

The paper deals with the issue of lobbying, defined as a democratic means of promoting interests. The text tries to find answers to the problems in the current economic theory. The basic links are defined by using a simple graphic model, which are further examined by the SWOT analysis. The...

We study how the number of ballot propositions affects the quality of decision making in direct democracy, as reflected in citizens' knowledge, voting behavior, and attitudes toward democracy. Using three comprehensive data sets from Switzerland with over 3,500 propositions, we exploit variation...

We assess the influence of moneyed interests on legislative decisions. Our theory predicts that the vote outcome distribution and donation flows in a legislature feature a discontinuity at the approval threshold of bills if special interest groups are involved in vote buying. Testing the...

Rich democracies have experienced a large increase in income inequality starting around 1980, coinciding with a rise in international trade and information technology. The leading theories used to explain changes in the income distribution - skilled biased technological change and globalization...

We estimate the causal effect of direct elections on the economic performance of politicians. Candidates running in direct elections to head local governments in the German state of Brandenburg need an absolute majority, and votes for the winner must represent at least 15% of eligible voters. If...

We study the optimal delegation problem which arises between the median voter (writer of the constitution) and the (future) incumbent politician when not only the state of the world and but also the politician's type (preferred policy) are the policy-maker's private information. We show that it...

Rich democracies have experienced a large increase in income inequality starting around 1980, coinciding with a rise in international trade and information technology. The leading theories used to explain changes in the income distribution — skill-biased technological change and globalization...

Drawing from previous research on the political business cycle and principal-agent theory on executive and congressional oversight of information sharing, I analyze the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) during presidential and...