1995 to study the fiscal effects of direct democracy. In the first part of the paper, we establish the relationship between … from Switzerland and the US - direct democracy causes an expansion of local government budgets. …

excluded from the voters' right of the initiative? I study this question by extending the analysis to German direct democracy … 2009, I show that in this sample and in contrast to the Swiss and US evidence direct democracy causes an expansion of local … towards exploiting their direct democracy rights and their preferences for local public policies. To address this issue I use …

deal with questions related to direct democracy, chapters three and four are about topics linked to representative … democracy. …

We study whether a democracy improves a measure of individual wellbeing; human heights. Drawing on individual …-level datasets, we test the hypothesis using a battery of eight different measures of democracy and derived averages, and include … models accounting for several confounders, regional and cohort fixed effects. We document that democracy - or its quality …