Results in cognitive psychology and experimental economics indicate that under identifiable conditions individuals do not act in an economically rational way. These results are important for political economy. Anomalies appear in the behavior of voters, politicians, and administrators. Economic...

Based on survey data for Switzerland, new empirical findings on direct democracy are presented. In the first part, the authors show that, on average, public employees receive lower financial compensation under more direct democratic institutions. However, top bureaucrats are more constrained in...

Survival in academia depends on publications in refereed journals. Authors only get their papers accepted if they intellectually prostitute themselves by slavishly following the demands made by anonymous referees who have no property rights to the journals they advise. Intellectual prostitution...

The price system is generally thought to be the epitome of efficiency. In some cases, however, lotteries are preferred to the market as a social decision-making system for reasons of fairness. As recent research has shown, neither procedure is always well accepted among the general population....

We reply to the comment of John Carey and Simon Hix on our original contribution entitled “District Magnitude and Representation of the Majority’s Preferences: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Popular and Parliamentary Votes” in Public Choice 151:585–610 (<CitationRef CitationID="CR3">2012</CitationRef>). District magnitude does...</citationref>

Representatives have more effective incentives to cater to the preferences of the majority of citizens when they are elected in districts with few rather than many seats. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by matching Swiss members of parliament’s voting behavior on legislative...

Rational voters' assessments of candidates and policy proposals are unbiased but affected by random errors. 'Clean' information decreases these errors, while 'dirty' information increases them. In politics, most voting procedures weigh random individual errors asymmetrically. Thus, such errors...

In this paper, we empirically test for the influence of fairness considerations on the willingness to redistribute income in private and in democratic decisions. In contrast to standard explanations of income redistribution, our theory takes into account that prices shift decisively as we move...