This Article explores the history of American women's long struggle for the vote; it does so to illuminate the efficacy of the franchise to produce political emancipation. This history reveals that struggles over constitutional values and rights are so often a story of how the dominance of one...

Two origins of the Voting Rights Act are familiar to us. Most prominent is the March 1965 assault of Alabama state troopers and Dallas County, Alabama deputy sheriffs and their posse on civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The Supreme Court tells a slightly...

The beauty premium in politics shows that attractive politicians are more likely to get elected to office than less attractive politicians, but little is known about whether beauty also shapes the behavior of members of parliament (MPs) once in office. We use newly collected data on the...

One of the major goals of libertarianism – and liberalism generally – is expanding political freedom: the opportunity to exercise meaningful choice over the government policies we live under. The main opportunity for political choice in modern liberal democracies is ballot box voting....

We can enhance development by making it easier for people to “vote with their feet” between jurisdictions. Few, if any, policy reforms can achieve such enormous increases in economic growth and opportunity. Foot voting is, in several crucial respects, a better mechanism of political...

This article uses unique voting data on 331 federal propositions to estimate voter preferences in Swiss cantons. We document that preferences vary systematically with canton characteristics. In particular, cantons whose voters are more conservative, less in favor of redistribution and less...

Many matters of U.S. election administration have attracted significant popular, political, and scholarly attention in recent years, especially after Bush v. Gore. Largely slighted, however, has been the matter of how the various state election systems respond when an election outcome is...

We study the effect of term limits on voter turnout in local Italian elections. Since 2014 the Italian law allows mayors in municipalities with a population size lower than 3,000 inhabitants to re-run for a third term, whereas mayors in cities with a number of residents above the cutoff still...

We study the effect of term limits on voter turnout in local Italian elections. Since 2014 the Italian law allows mayors in municipalities with a population size lower than 3,000 inhabitants to re-run for a third term, whereas mayors in cities with a number of residents above the cutoff still...

We study the opportunistic political budget cycle in the London Metropolitan Boroughs between 1902 and 1937 under two different suffrage regimes: taxpayer suffrage (1902-1914) and universal suffrage (1921-1937). We argue and find supporting evidence that the political budget cycle operates...