Countries differ substantially in how they deal with politicians that come from the public sector. Most constitutions include incompatibility and ineligibility rules due to concerns about conflicts of interest and the politicization of the public service. We study how these rules affect the...

Increasing number of studies is focusing attention to constitutional analysis of European Union institutions and distribution of intra-institutional and inter-institutional influence in the European Union decision making. Most of the studies are related to distribution of voting power in the EU...

This article examines whether the judges of the French Constitutional Court demonstrated partisanship when ruling on the validity of the elections to the lower house of the French Parliament between 1958 and 2005. It uses a new dataset on the decisions of the Constitutional Court which takes...

Die Stimmanteile der Bundesländer im Bundesrat basieren auf einem Stufenmodell in Abhängigkeit von der Einwohnerzahl. Da die Abstimmungsmacht nicht dem relativen Stimmanteil eines Bundeslands entspricht, analysieren die Autoren die Verteilung der Abstimmungsmacht im Bundesrat mit Hilfe von...

In 2009, the Australian, Brazilian and UK parliaments faced strong criticism - to say the least - over the issue of parliamentarians' expenses. The uncovering of widespread misuses of public resources by parliamentarians in each of these three countries was the subject of intense media and...

Kinder und Jugendliche sind bei Bundestagswahlen nicht wahlberechtigt. Dies wird zumeist mit fehlender politischer Reife begründet. In diesem Artikel simulieren wir, wie die Bundestagswahl 2017 ohne das Mindestwahlalter von 18 Jahren ausgegangen wäre („Kinderwahlrecht“). Wir nutzen Daten...

Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...