As with the market for goods and services, democratic competition involves political parties offering their services (policy programs) to citizen-consumers who vote for their preferred partisan supplier. Little is known about the partial effect of a shift in parties' seat shares for given voter...

Three sources of strategic tax interactions among local jurisdictions are usually considered in the literature: public expenditure spill-over, tax competition and yardstick competition. However, another source has now been suggested: the intellectual trend. According to that hypothesis,...

Is politics a lucrative business? The question is approached in this paper, as one of few to quantify the monetary returns to holding political office in a typical developed democracy where parties are the main political actors. By applying a difference-in-difference setting with a carefully...

Higher economic growth was generated during Democratic presidencies compared to Republican presidencies in the United States. The question is why. Blinder and Watson (2016) explain that the Democratic-Republican presidential growth gap (D-R growth gap) can hardly be attributed to the policies...

This paper develops a theoretical framework that makes predictions on (a) the conditions under which a populist party decides to run and the policy position it takes and (b) voters' response under different electoral systems. We test these predictions using data on Italian municipal elections...

Cooperative fiscal federalism needs a multi-level consent to decide on the allocation of intergovernmental transfers. We study how parliamentary representation of municipalities on the federal level influences the allocation of federal transfers to municipal governments under this type of...

We examine whether government ideology was correlated with the growth in military expenditure in Germany over the period 1951-2011. By using various measures of government ideology, the results do not show any effect. The exception is an ideology measure based on the Comparative Manifesto...

We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter’s point of view. We show that when parties are office motivated the voting rule should encourage parties to collect...

A well-known rationale for representative democracy is that direct democracy leads to a free-rider problem as to the collection of information. A problem with this rationale is that it takes for granted that representatives collect information. In this paper we examine whether or not electoral...

This paper examines the incentives for a party leader in office and for a parties' rank-and-file to replace a sitting member of parliament. As to the leader's decision, we show that the leader prefers to replace a critical member of parliament who votes against the leader's policy. A competent...