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

We analyze the effect of constituents’ preferences on legislators’ decisions within a quasi-experimental setting: In the Swiss referendum process, constituents and legislators vote on policy proposals and thus reveal their preferences. We match roll call votes of all legislators on 118...