Recently a wide and empirically-backed consensus has emerged arguing that direct democratic control over government's spending decisions through initiatives and referenda constrains government size. But what happens if budgetary matters are excluded from the voters' right of the initiative? I...

Aging societies face a fundamental challenge: How to represent future oriented policies in the politics of today? Voting age reforms and, more generally, policies that encourage the participation of the youth in politics are discussed as one solution. In this report, we study whether voting age...

This paper aims to raise the awareness and knowledge about state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Germany - a sizable but often ignored part of the overall public sector which the authors of this ZEW expert brief, therefore, label the "other government" - to facilitate an informed debate about the...

This paper exploits the introduction of the right of referenda at the local level in the German state of Bavaria in 1995 to study the fiscal effects of direct democracy. In the first part of the paper, we establish the relationship between referenda activity and fiscal performance by using a new...

Aging societies face a fundamental challenge: How to represent future oriented policies in the politics of today? Voting age reforms and, more generally, policies that encourage the participation of the youth in politics are discussed as one solution. In this report, we study whether voting age...

This paper aims to raise the awareness and knowledge about state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Germany - a sizable but often ignored part of the overall public sector which the authors of this ZEW expert brief, therefore, label the "other government" - to facilitate an informed debate about the...