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...

How do parties motivate candidates to exert effort in closed-list elections? If each candidate’s primary goal is winning a seat, then those in safe and hopeless list positions have weak incentives to campaign. We present a model in which (i) candidates care about both legislative seats and the...

We study the private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians. Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician-bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of bureaucrats ran for political...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of democratic systems in preventing individuals with criminal backgrounds from holding political office. Unlike many countries, Norway has no legal restrictions against felons running for office. We analyze local election candidates from 2003 to 2019, paired...

The tax structure is important for the income distribution and therefore a key playground for redistributive politics. The standard theory assumes that more unequal income distribution will create a majority for more redistribution (Meltzer and Richard). This study investigates the empirical...

The paper investigates the relationships between costs and user charges in the sewage industry in Norwegian local governments. The purpose of the analysis is to answer the following questions: (i) To what extent is a higher unit cost passed on to consumers in terms of a higher user charge? (ii)...

This paper provides an empirical test of a principal tenet of fiscal federalism: that spending discretion, when granted to localities, leads to public-sector heterogeneity, with public-good levels adjusting to suit local demands. The test is based on a simple model of partial fiscal...

Recent analyses of intergenerational mobility show that investments in children pay big dividends. The priority of resources in early childhood also affects the working of the local economy. Geographic variation in child care services motivates location of families and thereby influences housing...