I provide a description of what I call the "bureaucratic reputation game", by defining the incentives of the relevant actors, their likely preferences, their available strategies, and how the playing out of such strategies produces organizational outputs. The main conclusions are twofold. First,...

We address empirically trust as a determinant of support for government intervention. The central notion provided in the present paper is that the influence of generalized social trust on intervention attitudes is conditional on the perceived reliability, honesty, and incorruptibility of state...

This paper studies the strategic foundations of the Representative Voter Theorem (Rothstein, 1991), also called the second version of the Median Voter Theorem. As a by-product, it also considers the existence of non-trivial strategy-proof social choice functions over the domain of...

In 2001, the state parliament of the German federal state of Hesse abolished a 5 percent legal electoral threshold for local elections. This reform had a stronger effect on municipalities with larger councils because implicit electoral thresholds decrease with council size. Exploiting...

Personal income taxation remains relatively low in many developing countries despite recent democratic advancement and rapid economic growth; this is hard to reconcile with standard political economy models of taxation. This paper argues that the details of political institutions help to explain...

This paper evaluates direct and structural discrimination as a means of increasing efforts in the most widely studied contests. We establish that a designer who maximizes efforts subject to a balanced-budget constraint prefers dual discrimination, namely, change of the contestants' prize...

In this note, three major areas of Buchanan's research are briefly described: (1) The ideas of Knut Wicksell on Buchanan's work, (2) constitutional economics and the veil of ignorance, and (3) the role of government and/or the power to tax. It is shown that these three areas had a major...

Democracy usually is identified by the right to vote. However, in recent times voting procedures have been criticized, as they seemingly do not guarantee that all parts of the population have an adequate voice in the established political process. We suggest invigorating an old but nearly...

In 2013, the European Union and United States initiated a new political dialogue regarding a further deepening of bilateral trade and investment relations, the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). In some member states, anti-TTIP street protests and political activists received...