We investigate the effect of electoral rules and forms of government on public policy outcomes using a new dataset on agriculture and food policies from 74 countries over the 1960-2005 period. Using both cross-sectional and panel data analyses we find robust evidence that the specific nature of...

Did austerity cause Brexit? This paper shows that the rise of popular support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), as the single most important correlate of the subsequent Leave vote in the 2016 European Union (EU) referendum, along with broader measures of political dissatisfaction, are...

We compare single round vs runoff elections under plurality rule, allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under runoff elections, the number of political candidates is larger, but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy and hence policy volatility are smaller, because the...

The Brexit vote took place three days before the June 26, 2016, Spain's parliamentary elections, in which anti-systemic parties performed worse compared to the previous elections (December 2015) despite the optimistic predictions of the pre-election polls and the surge in the support for...

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...