Efficient stock markets react to news. News about future economic policies can be derived from political events such as elections, the formation of new governments, changes in the composition of governments, etc. However, the news content of these events depends on the electoral system. In the...

Using a panel of budgetary data over the period 1989-1996, we analyse how political fragmentation of Flemish local governments affects their reactions in the context of a major reform of the grant system. This reform reallocated grants among municipalities and thus unavoidably created "winners"...

Political fragmentation has been shown to be an important determinant of electoral turnout. We introduce an empirical approach that allows disentangling the impact of two dimensions of such fragmentation: the number of parties and the size inequalities between those parties. This is important as...