Over the past four decades, the accumulation of policy legacies and public debt has led to a decline in fiscal flexibility in Germany and the United States. By applying an index of fiscal democracy to Germany, the paper illustrates the associated shrinkage of democratic control over budget...

Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...