This paper investigates the long-term trend and the underlying determinants of public sector centralization in Germany … the case of Germany. …

excluded from the voters' right of the initiative? I study this question by extending the analysis to German direct democracy … 2009, I show that in this sample and in contrast to the Swiss and US evidence direct democracy causes an expansion of local … towards exploiting their direct democracy rights and their preferences for local public policies. To address this issue I use …

: first fairness preferences, second beliefs on the sources of economic success and the functioning of democracy and third … selfinterest. We test this framework on representative survey data for Germany for the years 1991, 2000 and 2004. Our results …

1995 to study the fiscal effects of direct democracy. In the first part of the paper, we establish the relationship between …-in-discontinuity (DiD) design. By studying direct legislation in an archetypical cooperative federation as Germany, our paper extends the … from Switzerland and the US - direct democracy causes an expansion of local government budgets. …

contribution rule under democracy is driven by self-selection of treatments, information transmitted via the outcome of the … referendum, and democracy per se. In case treatments are endogenously chosen via a democratic decision-making process, the …

more visible instruments of direct democracy. The interactions are also mostly driven by petitions in same or similiar …

We study the effect of direct democracy on local taxation. Our setting is the German federal state of Bavaria, where in …