In most developing countries, politicians are mostly male, whose politics revolves around male household heads. The system does not stop women from voting, but politicians do not campaign directly for the female vote. A campaign run by a politician in Pakistan focusing only on women increased...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on policy-makers' voting patterns on interest rates. Applying (pooled) Taylor-type rules and using real-time information available from published inflation reports and voting records, the paper tests for heterogeneity among committee members in three...

Public preferences for charging tuition are important for determining higher education finance. To test whether public support for tuition depends on information and design, we devise several survey experiments in representative samples of the German electorate (N19,500). The electorate is...

Public preferences for charging tuition are important for determining higher education finance. To test whether public support for tuition depends on information and design, we devise several survey experiments in representative samples of the German electorate (N19,500). The electorate is...

We consider the voting behavior of Supreme Court Justices, finding evidence of co-dependencies in their votes. Coincident with changes in the party imbalance of the Court over time, sharp discontinuities in these dependencies are evident. Overall, the patterns suggest a tradeoff between...

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...

In this article, we empirically study the survival of the ruling party in parliamentary democracies using a hazard rate model. We define survival of a crisis as being successful in a critical vote in the parliament. We develop a general probabilistic model of political crises and test it...

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...

This paper examines why institutional shareholders frequently oppose activists when activism increases the value of target firms. Because institutions underweight targets and activism could adversely affect the values of rival firms, institutional investors often lack incentives to support...

This paper presents the first empirical analysis of the impact of Parliamentary immunity on the behavior and performance of politicians. Leveraging a Constitutional Amendment, the adoption of which lifted the immunity of 132 of the 550 members of the Turkish Parliament, we find that losing...

Eine neue Studie des ifo Instituts zeigt, dass Bundestagsabgeordnete von CDU/CSU, die in sicheren Wahlkreisen gewählt wurden, mit einer deutlich höheren Wahrscheinlichkeit gegen die Ehe für alle gestimmt haben als Abgeordnete aus umkämpften Wahlkreisen. Eine Erhöhung des Stimmenvorsprungs...

The role of women in Western societies changed dramatically in the 20th century. We study how political empowerment affected women's emancipation as reflected in their life choices like marital decisions and labor market participation. The staggered introduction of female suffrage in Swiss...

Can a small scale inflow of migrants affect electoral outcomes? We study whether the relocation of migrants from the Calais "Jungle" to temporary migrant-centers (CAOs) in France affected the results of the 2017 presidential election. Using an instrumental variables approach that relies on the...

How should a society choose between two social alternatives if participation in the decision process is voluntary and costly and monetary transfers are not feasible? Considering symmetric voters with private valuations, we show that it is utilitarian-optimal to use a linear voting rule: votes...

Under the "Third Vote" method, the voters cast no votes but are asked about their preferences on policy issues as declared in the party manifestos (like in voting advice applications, e.g. German Wahl-O-Mat). Then the policy profile of the electorate with the balance of public opinion on every...

This study investigates whether there is a link between the successful implementation of European co-hesion policy and the voters' attitudes towards the EU. Using the French presidential elections in 2017 as a case study, we do not solely consider regional funds expenditures but also its induced...

We use a field experiment to evaluate the impact of two informational get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns to boost female electoral participation in Paraguay. We find that public campaigns had no effect either on the probability of registration, or on voter turnout in the 2013 presidential...

We show how major shareholders can exploit their power over international organizations to hide their foreign-policy interventions from domestic audiences. We argue that major powers exert influence bilaterally when domestic audiences view the intervention favorably. When domestic audiences are...

We study communication in committees selecting one of two alternatives when consensus is required and agents have private information about their preferences. Delaying the decision is costly, so a form of multiplayer war of attrition emerges. Waiting allows voters to express the intensity of...

Using estimates of support for Leave across UK local authority areas constructed from a comprehensive 20,000 strong survey, we show that both the level and the geographic variation capturing differential degrees of support for Leave have changed significantly since the 2016 EU referendum. A lot...

Werden Bundestagsabgeordnete von ihren Parteien abgestraft, wenn sie in namentlichen Abstimmungen im Bundestag nicht mit ihrer Partei stimmen? Betrachtet wurden alle 218 namentlichen Abstimmungen in der Legislaturperiode 2009–2013 für 257 über die Liste in den Bundestag eingezogene...

This paper investigates the prevalence of vote-buying in democratic elections where stringent restrictions on corporate donations to political parties exist. We combine data from state assembly elections in India with household-level consumer expenditure surveys (conducted by NSSO) over the...

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union. We analyze vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom. We find that exposure to the EU in terms of immigration and trade provides relatively little explanatory power for the referendum...

We examine whether parties punish politicians who vote against the party line in roll-call votes. Using data of German members of parliament over the legislative period 2009-2013, we take into account that the effect of punishment differs along the list of candidates because a candidate is...

The existing studies based on the well known rational voter theory analyze voter turnout as the aggregate of individuals' binary choice of to vote or not to vote. However, when people need to travel to vote, the cost associated with different travel modes directly affects their voting decisions....

We examine the consequences of vote transparency in committees whose members fear being blamed by partisan observers for casting an unfavorable vote. We show that such social pressure, like optimal taxation, can improve the collective decision by mitigating a voting externality. Hence,...

This paper studies a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of exposure to refugees in the neighborhood on the support for far-right, nationalist, anti-immigration parties. In the state elections in an Austrian state in September 2015 the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPOE)...

Affirmative action rules are often implemented to promote women on labor markets. Little is known, however, about how and whether such rules emerge endogenously in groups of potentially affected subjects. We experimentally investigate whether subjects vote for affirmative action rules, against,...

We study whether national leaders' foreign education influences their foreign policy, measured by voting behavior at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). We hypothesize that "affinity" - pre-existing or developed while studying abroad - makes leaders with foreign education more likely to...

We explore the role of the transfers that UK regions received from the European structural and cohesion funds, as well as other economic and social factors, in determining the support for the Remain vote in the Brexit referendum. We find that past European transfers have played virtually no role...

An important concern about the surge in the number of refugees arriving in Europe is increased support for far-right, nationalist, anti-immigration parties. This paper studies a natural experiment in an Austrian federal state to identify the causal effect of exposure to refugees in the...