This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between the occupation of candidates running in parliamentary elections and their electoral success. To identify local-level variation in urbanization, we leverage exogenous changes to the boundaries of electoral constituencies in the...

Motivated by insufficient fiscal discipline in democracy, we introduce and examine “Catenarian Discipline Rules”. An office-holder decides in each period whether to use available resources for his/her own personal consumption or for providing public goods for the population. In the unique...

This paper revisits the conventional but unproven wisdom that voters penalize governments for adopting fiscal austerity in a sample of advanced economies. We consider the composition of the austerity package and the economic manifesto of the implementing government and find that austerity...