In parliament, individual representatives vote with a certain probability according to their constituents’ preferences. Thus, the mechanism of the Condorcet Jury Theorem can be fruitfully applied to parliamentary representation: The probability that a majority of representatives votes...

Analysing emotional states under duress or during heightened, life-and-death situations is extremely difficult, especially given the inability of laboratory experiments to adequately replicate the environment and the inherent biases of post event surveys. It is in this area that natural...

Public Auditors are fundamental institutions to supervise government agents. Without accurate information principals would find it hard to make adequate decisions. Since agents face strong incentives to misreport, competent audits of financial information are crucial. This paper is the first...

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...

This paper analyses the impact of direct democracy, trust in government, the court and the legal system, and federalism on tax morale. In the tax compliance literature it is novel to analyse tax morale as dependent variable and to systematically analyse the effects of formal and informal...

People not only care about outcomes, they also value the procedures which lead to the outcomes. Procedural utility is a potentially important source of human well-being. This paper aims at introducing the concept of procedural utility into economics, and argues that it should be incorporated...

Alienation to politics weakens political competition and can undermine the acceptance and legitimacy of democracy as a political system. Governance and representation problems at the local level cause part of citizens? lack of power and political alienation. Citizens have local power if they can...

Policymakers often propose strict enforcement strategies to fight the shadow economy and to increase tax morale. However, there is also a bottom-up approach such as, for example, decentralizing the political power to those who are close to the problems. Thus, this paper analyses the relationship...

In the course of history, a large number of politicians have been assassinated. Rational choice hypotheses are developed and tested using panel data covering more than 100 countries over a period of 20 years. Several strategies, in addition to security measures, are shown to significantly reduce...

In the economic literature various political institutions designed to control the government have been analyzed. However, an important institution has been neglected so far: independent auditing institutions with an extended mandate to analyze the budget draft and individual policy proposals. We...