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...

In an important and much cited study, Pettersson-Lidbom (2008) identifies significant left-wing majority coalition effects on economic outcomes for Swedish local governments, 1974-1994. We first replicate the original study and then extend the original research by applying Pettersson-Lidbom's...

Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) proposed that organizations persist when loyalty tempers incentives to exit after adverse shocks. We test this argument using newly digitized individual-level voting records from 28 English constituencies (1832-1868), covering 134,000 real votes....

We study the communication strategies on Twitter/X of 367 political leaders in 21 countries, focusing on electoral competition between populists and non-populists. We measure polarization by the ease with which the leader can be classified as populist or not, conditional on his tweet. We find...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for assessing individual democratic commitment and demonstrates its usefulness in the German context. Building on and bridging existing strands of research (e.g. on support for democracy, conceptualizations of democracy, evaluations of democracy), the...

Why do some economies recover from armed conflict much better than others? We provide evidence that political accountability determines whether post-conflict societies realize the peace dividend. We study Cambodia, where a nationwide landmine clearance campaign created large local potential...

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'...

We study how political parties share power internally by analyzing the allocation of list positions to different factions. We develop a theory of intraparty bargaining in which list positions shape the mobilization efforts of party activists in different factions. Our results allow us to link...

This is the first of four articles on the 2025 German federal elections, continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 elections. We begin with the 2023/24 electoral reform, which aimed to curb the uncontrolled growth of the Bundestag caused by political developments not envisaged in...

This is the second out of four papers on the 2025 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 Bundestag elections. We estimate the policy representation ability of the 29 parties that participated in the 2025 elections and of the 2025 Bundestag. For this...

This is the third out four papers on the 2025 German Bundestag elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 elections. In particular, this paper contributes to the discussion of the imperfection of the German 2023/24 Electoral reform in [Tangian 2025a]. We show that policy...

Voting procedures in many democracies satisfy a weak version of fairness called equity (Bartholdi et al., 2021) while violating the standard fairness criterion of anonymity. We study equitable voting procedures when there are more than two alternatives that can be ordered on a left-right...

This report documents our replication of Braley et al.'s (2023) study, which examined whether voters become less willing to subvert democratic norms upon learning that their political opponents are more committed to democracy than previously assumed. The original study found that correcting...

Previous research has established a link between democratic governance and sustainable economic growth. Yet, over the past decade, we have witnessed a global decline of democratic institutions across a wide range of political contexts. How has this erosion of democracy affected countries'...

"Pendular Voting" presents a novel two-stage voting procedure: A randomly chosen citizen group votes on a proposal replacing the status quo. Depending on the outcome, a "counterproposal" ensues, that is closer to/further away from the status quo than the original proposal. All citizens vote...

Organised crime groups often deliver electoral support to politicians, yet how they are rewarded remains unclear. Using data from Sicilian municipalities (1992-2022), we show that narrowly won races by Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi's party, coincide with sharp declines in the reallocation of...

We study how citizens' right to directly decide on policies through popular initiatives affects the attractiveness of extreme candidates in representative elections. In our theoretical framework, single prominent policy issues on which individual voters hold extreme views get a large weight in...

This paper sheds light on a neglected reason for women's underrepresentation in politics: crisis-induced gender gaps in incumbents' reelection with lasting negative effects on female representation. We use hand-collected data on 173,339 candidates in open-list local council elections (1997-2021)...