In the third decade of the 21st century, digitization, global events, challenges from authoritarian states, and difficulties of particular democracies to function properly confront democracy with a new series of challenges and opportunities that will force it to reinvent itself. The last decades...

This paper investigates whether the COVID-19 crisis has affected the way we think about (political) institutions, as well as our broader (policy) attitudes and values. We fielded large online survey experiments in Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, well into the first wave of the...

Value issues such as climate policy, immigration, or identity politics are among the most polarizing policy issues in the U.S. and other high-income countries. That polarization has been rising over the last decades. I investigate a novel channel of income inequality and political campaign...

International economic engagement has been increasingly framed in terms of liberal democratic values. Specifically, Chinese aid has been at the center of this debate. Since Chinese aid comes with "no strings attached," a popular narrative is that Chinese aid poses a challenge to conditional aid,...

What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...

We study consumers' concerns for the ideological values of their market counterparts and the implications of such concerns for the public promotion of values. Using a survey and online and laboratory experiments, we find that consumers are willing to pay premiums to exchange with counterparts...

The existing literature has shown that special interest groups can have both growth enhancing and retarding effects on an economy. In either case it is always assumed that the nature of the special interest groups remains constant over time. The hypothesis of this paper is that a dynamic...

This paper empirically investigates the underlying determinants of expenditure decentralization, based on the predictions of a new political economy model of partial decentralization. The analysis is based on an agency model, in which two levels of government are involved in the provision of a...