Experts' voting behavior is conjectured to be more objective than peer voting (own group/peers) and public voters (everyone interested), who are supposedly influenced by all sorts of subjective aspects. We examine differences in voting behavior between these groups by analyzing the voting...

The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the worldwide biggest live media events and the world’s leading broadcast of an international music competition. The countries of the European Broadcasting Union participate by sending an artist (or a group of artists) to the contest and both expert juries...

The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the worldwide biggest live media events and the world’s leading broadcast of an international music competition. The countries of the European Broadcasting Union participate by sending an artist (or a group of artists) to the contest and both expert juries...

This paper analyzes a model in which different rational individuals vote over the composition and time profile of public spending. Potential disagreement between current and future majorities generates instability in the social choice function that aggregates individual preferences. In...

How special interests shape legislative decisions is a fundamental question in political economy. In this paper, we examine the influence of corporations on climate change legislation, which plays an important role in addressing the negative externalities associated with greenhouse gas...

New technological developments have heightened interest in understanding and evaluating new tools of participatory and representative engagement in the political sphere. Recent academic research in this area is mainly theoretical, and focuses on voters rather than legislators. This study...

The exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union has had profound economic and political effects. Here, we look at a particular aspect, the power distribution in the Council of the European Union. Using the Shapley-Shubik power index, we calculate the member states' powers with and without...

Weighted committees allow shareholders, party leaders, etc. to wield different numbers of votes or voting weights as they decide between multiple candidates by a given social choice method. We consider committees that apply scoring methods such as plurality, Borda, or antiplurality rule. Many...

This paper analyzes a recent ballot in which two virtually identical popular initiatives, both demanding a decrease in the legal age of retirement in Switzerland, led to differences in approval rates of nearly seven percentage points. Based on this unique natural experiment, the existence of...

We generalize the War of Attrition model to allow for N + K firms competing for N prizes. Two special cases are of particular interest. First, if firms continue to pay their full costs after dropping out (as in a standard-setting context), each firm's exit time is independent both of K and of...

Some committees convene behind closed doors while others publicly discuss issues and make their decisions. This paper studies the role of open and closed committee decision making in presence of external influence. We show that restricting the information of interest groups may reduce the bias...

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...

Congress packages pork-barrel spending in complicated proposals that belie theories of distributive politics. We theorize that roll-call voting on such bills depends on grant programs' administrative centralization, party ties with presidents or home-state governors, and differences in...

We examine whether representatives are more likely to serve long-term campaign donors instead of constituents during times of low media attention to politics. Based on 425 roll calls between 2005 and 2014 in the US House of Representatives, we show that representatives are more likely to vote...

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...

Can abundance of natural resources affect legislators' voting behavior over federal tax policies? We construct a political economy model of a federalized economy with district heterogeneity in natural resource abundance. The model shows that representatives of natural resource rich districts are...

We examine whether, how, and why acquirer shareholder voting matters. We show that acquirers with low institutional ownership, high deal risk, and high agency costs are more likely to bypass shareholder voting. Such acquirers have lower announcement returns and make higher offers than those who...

Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? We leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika haben sich im ersten Amtsjahr von Donald Trump von ihren westlichen Verbündeten entfremdet. Das zeigt eine Studie des ifo Instituts, die das Abstimmungsverhalten in der UN-Generalversammlung von den Ländern der G 7, NATO, OECD und WEOG analysiert. Die...