In March 2020, the second ballot of local elections in the German state of Bavaria was held under an official state of emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Bavarian mayors are elected by majority rule in two-round (runoff) elections. Between the first and second ballot of the election, the...

Broadening democracy by lowering the voting age is on the political agenda in many democratic societies. Previous suffrage extensions suggest that there are systematic differences between what parliaments decide and what voters want with respect to enfranchisement of new groups. This paper...

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 empirical question of voting preferences and how these may change (swing) is yet to be answered, as there is little first-hand microeconomic evidence on swing voting. We focus on the interactions between voters' age and political cynicism. Towards this end, we apply a stated and revealed...

This paper investigates spatial spillovers in local spending decisions between the center and the surrounding local communities by using panel data of the canton of Lucerne during the 1990s. Due to the geographical fragmentation with a major central city and some 100 small suburban local...

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...

Members of parliament have more effective incentives to cater for the majority's preferences when they are elected in districts with few seats in parliament rather than in districts with many seats. We empirically investigate this hypothesis by matching voting behavior on legislative proposals...

We explore theoretically and empirically whether social interaction, including local and global interaction, influences the incidence of corruption. We first present an interaction-based model on corruption that predicts that the level of corruption is positively associated with social...

Gordon Tullock has been one of the most important founders and contributors to Public Choice. Two innovations are typical "Tullock Challenges". The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second relates to digital social networks such as Facebook,...

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...