We analyze the effect of different legislature size on per capita regional expenditure in Italy. According to the theory, legislature size has an indefinite effect on government spending because logrolling and transaction costs may have canceling effects. We find a large and significantly...

This paper investigates the causes of corruption in the Italian regions for the period 1980 to 2002 by selecting a number of hypotheses assessed in the literature. Corruption turns out to be driven by the level of per capita income and of education. While, as expected, income is negatively...

This paper investigates on the demographic, economic, political and cultural determinants of direct democracy in 87 countries using an index of direct democracy. The test is interesting since there are important variations across these countries in the referendum and initiative use. We apply a...

In the last two decades of the XIX century Italy became an industrial country. Historians maintain that this process was affected by the action of some interest groups that pursued both state protection from competition and specific public expenditure programs. Starting from the economic...

This paper investigates on the demographic, economic, political and cultural determinants of direct democracy in 87 countries using an index of direct democracy. The test is interesting since there are important variations across these countries in the referendum and initiative use. We apply a...

In the last two decades of the XIX century Italy became an industrial country. Historians maintain that this process was affected by the action of some interest groups that pursued both state protection from competition and specific public expenditure programs. Starting from the economic...

In European Parliament elections turnout rates, traditionally lower than in national parliamentary elections, decrease from one elections to the next, and show strong variations within and between countries. What explains this decline? Why are there such big differences between and within the EU...

US voters have been moving apart in the last twenty years. This paper analyzes how their voting participation has partitioned by looking at US counties in the 2012 Presidential elections. To tackle this question, we propose a methodology that jointly addresses spatial autocorrelation of the...

We analyze the effect of different legislature size on per capita regional expenditure in Italy. According to the theory, legislature size has an indefinite effect on government spending because logrolling and transaction costs may have canceling effects. We find a large and significantly...