It has often been pointed out in the literature that a symbiotic relationship exists between terrorist groups and the media. As yet, however, no formal model has been built based on this issue and only very little empirical research has been done in this field. The present contribution builds a...

Do crises erode trust in government? To answer this question, we leverage the quasi-experimental setting of the sharply increased military threat to the neutral county of Switzerland during the two world wars as an exogenous shock. In doing so, we exploit a unique feature of Swiss politics:...

We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures that there is always at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors from...

The impact of regulatory competition on policy outcomes and particularly on policy innova-tion is widely debated among scientists from different fields as well as among policymakers. In this paper, Swiss cantonal regulation is studied in order to gain further insights into the policy impact of...

Democratic elections look very much like a contest where voters have to compare the candidates according to an ordinal ranking. Nevertheless, the theory of tournaments has not yet been applied to Political Economics. Therefore, we deploy tournament models to analyse elections. The main...

With complementary Chinese data sets and alternative corruption measures, we explore the consequences of corruption. Adopting a novel approach we provide evidence that corruption can have both, positive and negative effects, on economic development. The overall impact of corruption might be the...

Paternalism is an attempt to influence the decisions of individuals for their own benefit even if there are no third parties involved. This seems to be a contradiction to normative individualism which provides the general or ientation of our modern demo cracies. Soft or libertarian paternalism...