autonomously by German municipalities. As election dates vary across local councils, the data allows us to disentangle effects … behavior as the growth rate of the local business tax is significantly reduced in the election year and the year prior to the … election, while it jumps up in the year after the election. This pattern turns out to be robust against a number of sensitivity …

interested in: Does the partisan identity of the mayor influence the voter's decision in the subsequent town council election … the mayor on the result of the last council election? We rely on a regression discontinuity design focusing on close … election outcomes based on municipal level data for Germany. We find that the party of the mayor can receive a bonus of 4 …

the endogenous variables; the federal election trend is treated as predetermined. Our results suggest that shocks in …

In the United Kingdom, Smith (2003;2004) has illustrated that prime ministers make their decision to call an election … to maximize the chance for re-election. This argument should be applicable to other majoritarian systems, yet various …

democratic experience and strong party ties. Utilizing the 1990 German Unification Election Study, I examine a natural experiment …