This paper has the objective of showing that identity based voting will lead to improvements in household welfare through increased access to welfare programs. Using newly available data from rural India, we establish that identity based voting will lead to enhanced participation in welfare...

During last sixty years, Turkish population moved from one province to another at the rate of about 7-8 percent per five-year interval. As a consequence of this massive internal migration, population residing in a province other than the one they were born in increased from 12 percent in 1950 to...

During last sixty years, Turkish population moved from one province to another at the rate of about 7-8 percent per five-year interval. As a consequence of this massive internal migration, population residing in a province other than the one they were born in increased from 12 percent in 1950 to...

During last sixty years, Turkish population moved from one province to another at the rate of about 7-8 percent per five-year interval. As a consequence of this massive internal migration, population residing in a province other than the one they were born in increased from 12 percent in 1950 to...

Pork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts. Such behavior is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system. We estimate the causal effect of local...

In federal countries, competence for policy matters is often shared between various levels of government. As only overall outcomes are observed, this might blur accountability by decreasing voters' ability to infer information about the performance of their leaders. In this article, we analyse...

This paper empirically investigates the underlying determinants of expenditure decentralization, based on the predictions of a new political economy model of partial decentralization. The analysis is based on an agency model, in which two levels of government are involved in the provision of a...

We investigate whether politicians award intergovernmental grants to core supporters. Our new dataset contains information on discretionary project grants from a German state government to municipalities over the period 2008-2011. The results show that discretionary grants were awarded to...

Group-based identity undermines democracy by impeding democratic change of government. A substantial literature has therefore studied how to make democracy consistent with group identity. We contribute to this literature by introducing the role of group decisiveness into voting incentives and...

Group-based identity undermines democracy by impeding democratic change of government. A substantial literature has therefore studied how to make democracy consistent with group identity. We contribute to this literature by introducing the role of group decisiveness into voting incentives and...