Only a few years ago, it was a widespread belief that globalisation would trigger processes of democratisation worldwide. However, even old and established democracies such as the United States have recently revealed serious weaknesses. This article shows that the US election system is heavily...

Traditional political economy has paid primary attention to the structuring of the principal-agent relationship between citizens and politicians and the role of competition and institutions in disciplining political agents. However, as the electoral control of politicians and the credibility of...

Government by majority rule voting requires that compromise be attainable, but not too easily. Little of the nation's business could be transacted without an ability on the part of the legislators and political parties to strike bargains, but government by majority rule voting could not...

We study the harmonization of the base remuneration for the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who were previously paid like national parliamentarians implying large differences between the delegations from the 27 member countries. Based on detailed information on individual MEPs between...

Using a new data set on Swiss state and local governments from 1890 to today, we analyze how the adoption of proportional representation affects fiscal policy. We show that proportional systems shift spending toward broad goods (e.g. education and welfare benefits) but decrease spending on...

We employ bootstrap methods (Efron (1979)) to test the effect of an important electoral reform implemented in Italy from 1993 to 2001, that moved the system for electing the Par-liament from purely proportional to plurality rule (for 75% of the seats). We do not find any effect on either the...