Drawing on panel data from six elections between 1998 and 2017 in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of immigration – described by Germany’s interior minister as the "mother of all political problems" – on electoral support for the far right and the far left. Our identification...

Members of parliament (MPs) often decide on their own salaries. Voters dislike self-serving politicians, and politicians are keen to gratify their voters. In line with the political business cycle theories, politicians thus may well delay deciding on increases in salaries until after elections....

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, nonmainstream parties if the latters ́electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal state of Hesse. The experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral...

In this paper incumbency effects in Federal Elections and Mayoral Elections in Germany are estimated using a quasi-experimental design which allows for causal inference under a set of rather mild assumptions. Relying on nonparametric and parametric estimation procedures and exploiting a recently...