Over the past four decades, the accumulation of policy legacies and public debt has led to a decline in fiscal flexibility in Germany and the United States. By applying an index of fiscal democracy to Germany, the paper illustrates the associated shrinkage of democratic control over budget...

Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...

The role of national parliaments in the EU has been at the centre of a long debate. Since the Maastricht treaty, new powers to the EU level have been accompanied not only by an increasing role of the European Parliament (EP) in the legislative process, but also by a number of declarations and...

This paper examines the performance of the European Parliament in EU AFSJ law and policy-making from the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty until the end of the first half of 2013. The paper situates the EP in the new post-Lisbon institutional setting, documenting its transition to ‘AFSJ...

Doubts persist about the democratic legitimacy and role of the European Parliament in EU decision-making – this article takes a critical look at the body's democratic credentials. An analysis of voter turnout and the impact the ‘Spitzenkandidaten process' had on the second-order nature of...