Can direct democracy provisions improve welfare over pure representative democracy? This paper studies how such provisions affect politicians' incentives and selection. While direct democracy allows citizens to correct politicians' mistakes, it also reduces the incentives of elected...

The public policies on mass transit and other economic policies have been unable to avoid increasing mass transit costs and urban bus fares, which places a burden on a majority of the population depending on public transit. This study analyzes the variations in urban bus fares and households...

2001 krizinden sonra 2007'ye kadar Türkiye ekonomisi uzun dönem ortalamasının çok üzerinde büyüdü. Üstelik bu büyüme hızı benzer ülkelerin büyüme hızlarının da üzerinde gerçekleşti. Aynı dönemde Türkiye mali disipline dayanan bir ekonomik programı uygulamaya koydu. Bu...

This paper examines the consequences of a government mimicking the policy of its competitor by studying the introduction of the welfare state in 19th century Germany. The reform conducted by the conservative government targeted blue-collar workers and aimed to reduce the success of the socialist...

Diermeier and Fong (2008a) recently proposed a legislative bargaining model with reconsideration in the context of a distributive policy environment. In this paper we prove general existence and necessary conditions for pure-strategy stationary equilibria for any finite policy space and...

This paper analyzes an ongoing bargaining situation in which preferences evolve over time and the previous agreement becomes the next status quo, determining the payoffs until a new agreement is reached. We show that the endogeneity of the status quo exacerbates the players' conflict of interest...

We argue that a long-run cultural persistence of right-wing ideology can explain the recent rise of right-wing populism. Shifts in the supply of party platforms can interact with this existing demand, and give rise to patterns of historical persistence. We study the context of Germany in the...

To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

We propose that false beliefs about the own current economic status are an important factor for explaining populist attitudes. Along with the subjects' receptiveness to right-wing populism, we elicit their perceived relative income positions in a representative survey of German households. We...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters' preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates' policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...