Trotz jahrzehntelanger Bemühungen zahlreicher Bundes- und Landesregierungen ist in Deutschland kein wirksamer nachhaltiger Bürokratieabbau gelungen. Vielmehr ist in den letzten Jahren eine deutliche Steigerung der Belastung von Unternehmen zu verzeichnen. Die Glaubwürdigkeit politischer...

Trotz jahrzehntelanger Bemühungen zahlreicher Bundes- und Landesregierungen ist in Deutschland kein wirksamer nachhaltiger Bürokratieabbau gelungen. Vielmehr ist in den letzten Jahren eine deutliche Steigerung der Belastung von Unternehmen zu verzeichnen. Die Glaubwürdigkeit politischer...

Die derzeitige Evaluierungspraxis und Evidenzorientierung politischer Prozesse ist in Deutschland noch deutlich ausbaufähig. Internationale Erfahrungen zeigen die großen Vorteile einer systematischen, evidenzbasierten Politikgestaltung. In wirtschaftlich und politisch angespannten Zeiten ist...

Just resilience is a conceptual framework to guide equitable, persistent and transformative adaptation to climate change impacts, ensuring that systems are robust and can shift when previous equilibria become unsustainable. Much research exists to define this concept, with much less instruction...

Just resilience is a conceptual framework to guide equitable, persistent and transformative adaptation to climate change impacts, ensuring that systems are robust and can shift when previous equilibria become unsustainable. Much research exists to define this concept, with much less instruction...

The debate in the European Union (EU) on the expansion of majority decision-making is entering a new round. Germany, in particular, is seeking to build a coalition in favour of more majority decisions in light of the, at times, difficult decision-making process concerning foreign and security...

Latin America is widely acknowledged as one of the most unequal regions of the world (Sánchez-Ancochea 2021). But it is also one of the most democratic, certainly as compared to other developing regions. These two facts seem difficult to reconcile. Both folk theories of democratic...

A core activity of decentralising internet projects has been participation, and with it the democratising potential of governing through consensus. This encounter between democratic ideals on one side and its integration into socio-technical projects on the other has had significant consequences...

Am 21. April 2023 wurde das Gesetz zum Neustart der Digitalisierung der Energiewende (GNDEW), eingebracht von den Fraktionen Bündnis 90/ Die Grünen, der SPD sowie der FDP und federführend entwickelt vom Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz (BMWK), vom Bundestag, verabschiedet....

We study pre-vote interactions in a committee that enacts a welfare-improving reform through voting. Committee members use decentralized promises contingent on the reform enactment to influence the vote outcome. Equilibrium promises prevent beneficial coalitional deviations and minimize total...

The COVID-19 pandemic is permanently changing modern social and economic coexistence. Most governments have declared infection control to be their top priority while citizens face great restrictions on their civil rights. A pandemic is an exemplary scenario in which political actors must decide...

Am 21. April 2023 wurde das Gesetz zum Neustart der Digitalisierung der Energiewende (GNDEW), eingebracht von den Fraktionen Bündnis 90/ Die Grünen, der SPD sowie der FDP und federführend entwickelt vom Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz (BMWK), vom Bundestag, verabschiedet....

The Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) used by the Council of the European Union developed to a high degree of complexity from one modifying treaty to another, until the latest definition stipulated in the Treaty of Lisbon. This paper analyses this EU intra-institutional voting method using a...

We investigate how female representation impacts policymaking using the example of child care and new hand-collected data on local council elections in Bavaria. RDD estimations (mixed-gender races for last party-specific council seats) show that an additional female councilor accelerates the...

Institutional constraints to counter potential abuses in the use of political power have been viewed as essential to well functioning political institutions and good public policy outcomes in the Western World since the time of ancient Greece. A sophisticated intellectual tradition emerged to...

This paper introduces a new storable vote mechanism (storable votes, pay-as-you-win-mechanism, SV-PAYW) where a fixed number of votes can be cast among different alternatives, and the votes spent (and redistributed) on each election depend only on the number cast for the wining alternative. The...

When will government elites prepare for natural hazards? Existing research posits that governments will respond to disasters, but rarely have incentives to prepare for them. This Element argues that disaster preparedness can, and does, occur in the context of both motivated ruling elites and a...

Before the middle of the nineteenth century most laws enacted in the United States were special bills that granted favors to specific individuals, groups, or localities. This fundamentally inegalitarian system provided political elites with important tools that they could use to reward...

We investigate whether ideology drives the sentiments of parliamentarians when they speak to the central bank they hold accountable. To this end, we collect textual data on the quarterly hearings of the ECB President before the European Parliament from 1999 to 2019. We apply sentiment analysis...

Millions of women continue to die during and soon after childbirth, even where the knowledge and resources to avoid this are available. We posit that raising the share of women in parliament can trigger action. Leveraging the timing of gender quota legislation across developing countries, we...

Governments increasingly use RCTs to test innovations before scale up. Yet, we know little about whether and how they incorporate the results of the experiments into policy-making. We follow up with 67 U.S. city departments which collectively ran 73 RCTs in collaboration with a national Nudge...

The role of citizens' initiatives figures prominently in contemporary debates on constitutional change. A basic question is why are initiatives necessary in a representative democracy where candidates must already compete for the right to control policy? This paper offers one answer to this...

In the debate on how to strengthen the European Union’s (EU) capacity to act, calls for an extension of qualified majority voting (QMV) are growing louder. The Council of the EU is currently discussing using the so-called passerelle clauses in the Treaty on European Union (TEU). With these...

We develop a numerical model that simulates the evolution of a virtual population with an incentive and ability-based wage, capital yield from savings, social welfare system, and total income subject to taxation and political turnovers. Meta-heuristics, particle swarm optimization (PSO) in...

Entitlement programs have become an increasing component of total government spending in the US over the last six decades. To some observers, this growth of the welfare state is excessive and unwarranted. To others, it is a welcome counter-acting force to the rapid increase in income inequality....

Zur Umsetzung einer Verkehrsverlagerung vom autozentrierten Individualverkehr auf den (elektrifizierten) Schienenverkehr bedarf es unter anderem einer neuen Schwerpunktsetzung in der Infrastrukturplanung. Die Erarbeitung von Projektvorschlägen für den Bundesverkehrswegeplan 2030 auf der Ebene...