Despite controversial debates about the social acceptability of its nationalist program, the rightwing populist AfD has recently entered all state parliaments as well as the federal parliament in Germany. Although professed AfD voters faced a likely risk of social stigmatization, electoral...

Lower-level officials often engage in clientelistic relations with the upper-level government. The nature of these relations might be determined by institutional factors such as how the lower-level officials come into their position. This paper specifically highlights the different political...

Many countries have adopted decentralization policies in order to strengthen democratic governance. Nevertheless, empirical literature on whether decentralization actually strengthens democratic governance is relatively limited when compared to empirical literature on the impact of...

International crises like dramatic terror attacks leave their mark on society in various ways. According to the existing literature, some of these consequences include two seemingly conflicting responses: increasing as well as decreasing support for the incumbent government. To make sense of...

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the conditions of self-enforcing democracy by analyzing the recent wave of autocratic transitions. Based on a game-theoretic framework, we work out the conditions under which governments may induce the diverse public authorities to...

We study whether the experience of losing one's job due to the Treuhand activities in the early 1990s affected long-term political behavior among citizens of the former German Democratic Republic. During the German Reunification process, the Treuhand coordinated the privatization of former GDR...