Voters who participate in elections to the European Parliament tend to use these elections to punish their domestic governing parties. Many students of the EU therefore claim that the party-political composition of the Parliament should systematically differ from that of the Council. This study,...

The two fundamental questions addressed in this thesis are 1) what are the characteristics that are associated with an Australian federal parliamentarian becoming a cabinet minister, and 2) how do these characteristics help a parliamentarian become a cabinet minister? I examine the standard...

In practice one rarely observes pure forms of dictatorship that lack a council, or pure forms of parliament that lack an executive. Generally government policies emerge from organizations that combine an executive branch of government, the king, with a cabinet or parliamentary branch, the...

We study the effect of political polarization on public spending using the dispersion of self-reported political preferences as our measure of polarization. Political polarization is strongly associated with smaller government in democratic countries, but there is no relationship between...