We study popular initiatives as an important element of direct democracy. The initiative process is modelled as a sequential game under uncertainty: petitioners collect signatures to qualify the initiative and elicit information about the initiative's winning probability. Politicians decide...

Can direct democracy provisions improve welfare over pure representative democracy? This paper studies how such provisions affect politicians’ incentives and selection. While direct democracy allows citizens to correct politicians’ mistakes, it also reduces the incentives of elected...

In this paper, I analyze the voting outcomes of two very similar Swiss referendum ballots concerning the federal government’s competency to levy income, capital and turnover taxes to find out how the enfranchisement of women influences public support for government spending. The first ballot...

In this paper, I challenge the notion that women prefer larger governments than men which is why extending the franchise to women has led to an increase in government spending in many industrialized countries. I estimate the average treatment effect of being female on support for government...

By drawing on information from public accounts from the nineteenth and twentieth century the present paper aims at mapping the development of key financial indicators for the Norwegian central government sector. It concludes that growth in the size of this sector often, but clearly not always,...

Social capital is often associated with desirable political and economic outcomes. This paper contributes to a growing literature on its "dark side". We examine the role of social capital in the downfall of democracy in interwar Germany. We analyze Nazi Party entry in a cross-section of cities,...

The last decade’s Reforms in post-communist countries demonstrated, the aid proved to be most efficient in the countries where due to a timely schedule and consistency in reform implementation, governments can easily do without it. In case of Russia both the reformists and officials of...

This paper analyzes the effect the gender of local policymakers on policy outcomes. Analyzing a rich dataset from Brazilian municipalities and using a regression discontinuity design, we find that municipalities ruled by female mayors have better health outcomes, receive more federal...

Women's suffrage led to one of the greatest enfranchisements in history. Voting rights, however, were not won by force or threats thereof, a fact leading political economy theories find hard to explain. Studying the timing of suffrage extensions in US states between 1869 and 1919, we find that a...

We analyze the factors that influence the support for environmental policy proposals. Swiss referendum data show that proposals obtain more yes-votes if they do not restrict consumption possibilities directly, if they are endorsed by business associations, if environmental preferences are strong...