Social and/or political involvement within the population is often argued to enhance public sector performance. The underlying idea is that engagement fosters political awareness and interest and increases the public’s monitoring ability. Still, although extensive voter involvement may put...

The government fragmentation hypothesis (GFH) states that coalition governments spend more than single-party governments due to an underlying common pool problem. Using a large panel data set on 604 local governments in the German state of Baden-Württemberg for the 1994-2014 period, I test the...