In the literature on electoral politics full convergence of policy platforms is usually regarded as socially optimal. Thereason is that risk-averse voters prefer a sure middle-of-the-road policy to a lottery of two extremes with the sameexpectation. In this paper we study the normative...

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...

Die vorliegende Studie befasst sich mit einem Experiment im Bereich transnationaler demokratischer Willensbildung. Im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung steht die Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), ein 1998 gegründete gemeinnützige Unternehmen mit Sitz in Kalifornien, das...

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...