Using a natural voting experiment in Switzerland that encompasses a 160-year period (1848-2009), we investigate whether a higher level of complexity leads to increased reliance on expert knowledge. We find that when more referenda are held on the same day, constituents are more likely to refer...

In Switzerland, two key church institutions - the Conference of Swiss Bishops (CSB) and the Federation of Protestant Churches (FPC) - make public recommendations on how to vote for certain referenda. We leverage this unique situation to directly measure religious organizations' power to shape...

A pandemic is not only a biological event and a public health disaster, but it also generates impacts that are worth understanding from a societal, historical, and cultural perspective.In this contribution, we argue that as the disease spreads, we are able to harness a valuable key resource,...

Behavioural responses to pandemics are less shaped by actual mortality or hospitalization risks than they are by risk attitudes. We explore human mobility patterns as a measure of behavioural responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results indicate a strong negative relationship between...

Although science has been an incredibly powerful and revolutionary force, it is not clear whether science is suited to performance under pressure; generally, science achieves best in its usual comfort zone of patience, caution, and slowness. But if science is organized knowledge and acts as a...

In March 2020, the second ballot of local elections in the German state of Bavaria was held under an official state of emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Bavarian mayors are elected by majority rule in two-round (runoff) elections. Between the first and second ballot of the election, the...

Trust in the health care system requires being confident that sufficient and appropriate treatments will be provided if needed. The COVID-19 public health crisis is a significant, global, and (mostly) simultaneous test of the behavioral implications arising from this trust. We explore whether...

This paper examines the effects of globalisation on the pace of governments implementing international travel restrictions during the recent coronavirus pandemic. We find that more globalised countries experienced a longer delay in implementing international travel restriction policies with...

Bavarian mayors are elected by majority rule in two-round (runoff) elections. Between the first and second ballot of the mayoral election in March 2020, the Bavarian state government announced an official state of emergency with measures to fight the spread of Covid-19, including a shutdown of...

The empirical question of voting preferences and how these may change (swing) is yet to be answered, as there is little first-hand microeconomic evidence on swing voting. We focus on the interactions between voters' age and political cynicism. Towards this end, we apply a stated and revealed...