We describe Aristotle's mathematical model of weighted voting to explain and implement decision-making in democracies, oligarchies and the mixed states that combine elements of both systems. This model, originally presented in textual form, extends the known history of social choice theory back...

A growing literature concerns the role of symbolic politics, including how political parties benefit electorally from politicizing the past, a strategy which should be more effective in localities with physical memories of the past. We test this argument by studying the effect of the local...

We provide a rationale for Co-Voting, a decision-making procedure that blends elements of direct and representative democracy to mitigate their main inefficiencies. A randomly selected group of citizens receives voting rights on specific issues, with their collective decision aggregated with...

The transition to neighborhood-scale district heating in the Netherlands frequently stalls due to the challenge of achieving a collective agreement among individual homeowners. To explore the micro-dynamics of this collective action problem, this paper introduces an agent-based model that...

James Buchanan would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2019. This serves as an inspiration to look at the future of public choice and the question of how much normativity public choice can bear. In our analysis we draw parallels between public choice and German ordoliberalism (and its source...

James Buchanan would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2019. This serves as an inspiration to look at the future of public choice and the question of how much normativity public choice can bear. In our analysis we draw parallels between public choice and German ordoliberalism (and its source...

Mission-oriented innovation policies are becoming increasingly popular among policymakers and scholars. We maintain that these policies are based on an overly mechanistic view of innovation and economic growth, suggesting that a more bottom-up approach is called for. By invoking an...

Cities increasingly address climate change, e.g. by pledging city-level emission reduction targets. This is puzzling for the provision of a global public good: what are city governments' reasons for doing so, and do pledges actually translate into emission reductions? Empirical studies have...

This paper investigates the causal effect of the term length of political executives on economic policy outcomes. To establish causality, we exploit the staggered adoption of four-year terms for governors across US states, using data for the period 1937-2008. We find that increasing governors'...

Cross-national parliamentary data have increasingly enabled scholars to study the behavior of individual Members of Parliament (MPs), allowing insights into issues such as (re)selection, intra-party dissent, and representation. Yet data on MPs' activity have largely been limited to speeches,...

We review the evolution of the concept of utility in economics, addressing the conceptual and terminological fragmentation that characterises the interdisciplinary debate. This study adopts the scoping review framework to systematically analyse the main theoretical approaches, ranging from...

In this paper, we study whether local spending of intergovernmental grants is influenced by mayoral elections in the grant receiving municipality. We exploit the implementation of the German federal government's second economic stimulus package of 2009 (K2) in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg as...

This chapter surveys economic perspectives on the separation of powers, revealing how contemporary research in political economics and the economic analysis of law conceptualize and assess institutional checks on government authority. Emphasizing principal-agent theory, it unpacks how...

We investigate the determinants of states' policy capacity, defined as the ability of states to craft effective policies. Our model shows that the interaction between politicians' implementation decisions and bureaucrats' motivation to design effective policies can lead to the coexistence of...

This study critically examines HYBRIT (Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology), a Swedish flagship project-led by the government-owned iron ore company LKAB-to produce fossil-free sponge iron using hydrogen from fossil-free electricity. Positioned as a cornerstone of the EU Green Deal and...

This paper studies how legislative institutions shape distributive policy outcomes. Specifically, I analyze the effect of budget committee membership in the German Bundestag using a novel dataset of 4,629 geocoded federal grants (1999- 2023). Employing a within-legislator...

We use data from a Norwegian field experiment where young students were taught mathematics in small, homogenous groups to investigate how treatment effects varied across middle-achieving students dependent on their rank order and their tutors’ instructional practices. We find that individuals...