Can right-wing terrorism increase support for far-right populist parties, and if so, why? Exploiting quasi-random variation between successful and failed attacks across German municipalities, we find that successful attacks lead to significant increases in the vote share for the right-wing,...

We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors between zero to four from...

In 2001, the state parliament of the German federal state of Hesse abolished a 5 percent legal electoral threshold for local elections. This reform had a stronger effect on municipalities with larger councils because implicit electoral thresholds decrease with council size. Exploiting...

This paper investigates the effects of local exposure to refugees on electoral outcomes in the 2016 state election in Germany. Based on quasi-random variation in the allocation of refugees across municipalities and unique data on refugee populations and their type of accommodation, I find that...