A recent democratic experience in Tunisia in which a religious political party, Ennahdha, took over government for 3 years, provides an opportunity to learn from the interactions between the support to religious parties and improvements in infrastructure access rates. The correlation is not...

We examine the extent to which political scandals influence trust in electoral institutions in established Western democracies. The second ballot of the 2016 Presidential election in Austria needed to be repeated because of inconsistencies in individual electoral districts (scandal districts)....

Broadening democracy by lowering the voting age is on the political agenda in many democratic societies. Previous suffrage extensions suggest that there are systematic differences between what parliaments decide and what voters want with respect to enfranchisement of new groups. This paper...

We examine the extent to which political scandals influence trust in electoral institutions in established Western democracies. The second ballot of the 2016 Presidential election in Austria needed to be repeated because of inconsistencies in individual electoral districts (scandal districts)....

Do emotions affect the decision between change and the status quo? We exploit exogenous variation in emotions caused by rain and analyze data on more than 870,000 municipal vote outcomes in Switzerland to address this question. The empirical tests are based on administrative ballot outcomes and...

Since the early 1980s a wave of liberalizing reforms has swept over the world. While the stated motivation for these reforms has usually been to increase economic efficiency, some critics have instead inferred ulterior motives and a desire to enrich certain (already rich) people at the expense...

Since the early 1980s a wave of liberalizing reforms has swept over the world. While the stated motivation for these reforms has usually been to increase economic efficiency, some critics have instead inferred ulterior motives and a desire to enrich certain (already rich) people at the expense...

In "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy", Robert D. Woodberry (2012) claims that the emergence of stable democracies around the world was influenced by conversionary Protestantism. While Woodberry's historical analysis is exhaustive, the accompanying empirical evidence suffers from severe...