At the academic level and in political practice, participatory and evidence-based political processes are increasingly recognized as mechanisms that guarantee more efficient political decisionmaking. However, no theoretical framework that allows a clear definition of participatory and...

Apart from the computational time and expenses of the CGE model, the discussion of elasticity parameter estimation and various closure rules as well as the difficulty of combining the results with other analysis approaches always poses obstacles ahead of us, therefore we are motivated to apply...

Electoral competition is a democratic mechanism to guarantee high governmental performance. In reality, however, it often leads to policy failure due to Government Capture and Government Accountability. An understanding of both phenomena has to be based on voter theory and nowadays the...

When a new technology is introduced to farmers, not only do individual and household factors such as risk attitudes, wealth and resource endowments affect a farm household’s likelihood of technology adoption but probably more importantly, social capital structures also appear to matter. In...

A predominantly agrarian country where land is one of the most important productive assets, land reform remains one of the most important but contentious policy issues in Sierra Leone. Despite several failed attempts to reform the country's current land property rights and administrative...

The subject of risk in agricultural production is very pertinent and touches on various aspects such as investments, food security, income levels of farmers, and market stability. Unmanaged, risks can have profound impacts on the agricultural sector and at the same time severely hamper long-term...

In a world of increasing complexity, politicians have only limited information about the relationship of policies and the outcomes. They often make use of simplified heuristics, i.e. policy beliefs. Hence, an influence opportunity for interest groups occurs: informational lobbying. It...

This paper investigates the empirical causal relationship between farmers organizations membership and food availability in Senegal. Using a unique country scale farm-level data of cereals farming households, and applying various econometrics estimations techniques that control for selection...

Policy making in Sub-Saharan Africa commonly assume that food and nutrition security programs that target food insecure households would most likely impact on malnourished individuals. This is despite the compelling evidence from elsewhere in the developing world that show a food distribution...

Farm animal welfare is the main driver of nowadays criticism on German livestock sector. At the same time, non market actors more and more are key actors within animal welfare politics. Hence, we investigate political power of stakeholder organizations in German livestock policy. Our network...