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...

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, non-mainstream 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 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 dissertation contributes to the emerging literature on endogenous political institutions and the causal relationship between institutions and the political and economic environment. For the purpose, all chapters rely on electoral reforms used as natural experiments that induce exogenous...

We exploit a natural experiment to study the political consequences of explicit electoral thresholds. The natural experiment in question is an electoral reform in the German federal state of Hesse. In 2001, the state parliament abolished the five percent electoral threshold for local elections....

This paper documents an important but mostly overlooked reason for female underrepresentation in politics: gender gaps in the recontest likelihood of candidates. Using hand-collected data on 116,185 candidates in four consecutive local council elections (2001-2016) in a German state, we provide...