This study examines the dynamics of economic freedom in nine advanced democracies in comparison to China over the 1970-2022 period. Using data from the Fraser Institute and the Manifesto Project Database, we apply a Bayesian time-series methodology to identify three key patterns. First, economic...

Declining civic engagement increasingly strains welfare state institutions. This paper asks whether civic values can be shaped through early educational investments. I study Tax and School, a large-scale program implemented in Italian primary and secondary schools to promote fiscal and civic...

The influence of political stability on financial crime remains a subject of ongoing debate. While stability is often associated with policy continuity, regulatory credibility, and more effective enforcement, an alternative view suggests that unstable democracies may outperform stable...

The weaponization of agricultural trade has once again emerged as critical in the study of modern geopolitics due to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Although Russia has used its wheat exports as a means of enhancing its geopolitical influence over countries in the Global South, evidence...

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...

Air pollution is a major externality whose consequences extend beyond health and productivity. This paper shows that short-run pollution shocks also reduce democratic participation. We combine official, municipality-level election results from 32 national, European, regional, and municipal...

Die arbeitsmarktökonomische Forschung zu Betriebsräten hat über eine lange Zeit hinweg gesamtgesellschaftliche Implikationen vernachlässigt und ausschließlich die ökonomischen Konsequenzen untersucht, die sich auf betrieblicher Ebene ergeben. Erst seit Kurzem gehen Studien der Frage nach,...

Five years after the bloody military coup and amid a civil war, elections have taken place in Myanmar. They were neither free nor fair, nor was any attempt made to keep up an appearance of even minimum democratic standards. From the outset, the main purpose of the elections was not political...

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...

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...

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...

We present the first systematic analysis of how countries cover each other in the news, using a newly constructed dataset of 55,240 media sources from 176 countries between 2015 and 2022, drawing upon a corpus of 1.4 billion online news articles. We document a pattern of global media bias:...

Social media platforms are often credited with empowering grassroots movements in the pursuit of political freedoms. In this paper, we show how social media can also be exploited by political elites to undermine democratic institutions, using the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection as a case...

Political advertising ethics has long been dominated by an adherence to the norms of democratic idealism or the highly situational ethics of act utilitarianism. This article proposes an alternative system of political advertising ethics grounded in Brandt’s ideal moral code theory, a form of...

AI governance needs to be democratic. Canada has stated that it wants to hear from a wide range of Canadians for its consultation process on AI governance, offering constituents a few options to provide insights, but there is much more Canada (and other democracies) could do to meaningfully...

Immigrant rights have been found to be better protected in democracies than in authoritarian regimes, but there is no systematic test of different explanations of why this is the case. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by investigating which features of democratic political systems are...

This paper examines the impact of using the Internet and social networks as sources of information on individuals' understanding of democracy. The analysis draws on data from the sixth round of the Afrobarometer survey, conducted in 2014, across a sample of African countries, some of which are...

In this study, we conduct a direct replication of Lorenz-Spreen et al. (2023)'s systematic review on digital media and democracy to verify and enhance the robustness of their findings. We successfully reproduce the main claims of the original paper, uncovering a few minor coding errors that do...

As part of the confirmation hearings process, Executive Vice-President-designate Henna Virkkunen responded in writing to questions posed by Parliament and appeared before the ITRE and IMCO committees on 12 November 2024 to answer further questions from MEPs belonging to those committees, as well...

As part of the confirmation hearings process, Executive Vice-President-designate Henna Virkkunen responded in writing to questions posed by Parliament and appeared before the ITRE and IMCO committees on 12 November 2024 to answer further questions from MEPs belonging to those committees, as well...

Ein Finanzparlament oder vergleichbares Gremium anderen Namens würde finanzielle Ent­scheidungen treffen oder zumindest kontrollieren für seine jeweilige Organisation, sei diese ein Staat, eine internationale Vereinigung oder ein Verein. Stimmrechte für ein Finanz­parlament würden nicht...

Ishiba Shigeru became prime minister of Japan in October 2024, after unexpectedly winning the leadership of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). His long-desired success came with a bitter aftertaste, however. After a poor showing for the LDP in the lower house elections at the end of...

A series of studies show that unions and works councils have an influence on workers' political activities and attitudes. However, at issue are the transmission channels through which worker representation impacts workers' political activities and attitudes. This article discusses from a...

A series of studies show that unions and works councils have an influence on workers' political activities and attitudes. However, at issue are the transmission channels through which worker representation impacts workers' political activities and attitudes. This article discusses from a...

We study the causal effect of country-specific democratic regime change on bilateral trade flows, extending structural gravity empirics to ‘heterogeneous gravity’ estimated at the country-pair level. Our difference-in-differences implementation accounts for selection into regime change,...

New ODI research underscores how women's movements are leading the push for democratic governance and inclusion, particularly in contexts of eroding civic space or where democracies are increasingly authoritarian. Yet, they face growing backlash from a rising tide of politicised religion. Based...

This study explores the complex relationship between information pollution, polarisation, and democracy in Brazil, a country that has recently experienced both democratic erosion and a pivotal democratic “U-turn”. Information pollution – the dissemination of false, misleading or harmful...