Der Deutsche Bundestag umfasst gegenwärtig 709 Abgeordnete. In keiner Legislaturperiode zuvor waren es so viele. Schließlich liegt die Sollstärke bei 598 Abgeordneten – 299 direkt gewählte Abgeordnete aus den Wahl­kreisen und ebenso 299 Abgeordnete, die über die Liste ins Parlament...

Recent contributions to the political economics literature (Trebbi et al. 2007; Aghion et al. 2004) have challenged the view that political institutions are exogenous to the behaviour of agents in the political arena. We explicitly address the potential endogeneity of institutions by examining the...

Woman suffrage led to the greatest enfranchisement in the history of the United States. Before World War I, however, suffrage states remained almost exclusively confined to the American West. The reasons for this pioneering role of the West are still unclear. Studying the timing of woman...

Woman suffrage led to the greatest enfranchisement in the history of the United States. Before World War I, however, suffrage states remained almost exclusively confined to the American West. The reasons for this pioneering role of the West are still unclear. Studying the timing of woman...

Woman suffrage led to one of the greatest enfranchisements in history. Yet, women neither won the right to vote by force, nor did men grant it under the imminent threat of female unrest. These facts are difficult to reconcile with leading political economy theories of suffrage extensions. In...

We offer a rationale for the decision to extend the franchise to women within a politico-economic model where men are richer than women, women display a higher preference for public goods, and women's disenfranchisement carries a societal cost. We first derive the tax rate chosen by the male...

This paper tests the hypothesis that the extension of the voting franchise was caused by the threat of revolution, as suggested by Acemoglu and Robinson [Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, 1167-1199, 2000]. We approximate the threat of revolution in a given country by revolutionary events...

We use evidence from the Second Reform Act, introduced in the United Kingdom in 1867, to analyze the impact on electoral outcomes of extending the vote to the unskilled urban population. By exploiting the sharp change in the electorate caused by franchise extension, we separate the effect of...