This working paper first outlines the contours of a discourse analytical approach to the study of legitimation processes and then presents findings from a quantitative analysis of legitimacy-related communication in selected print media of the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States...

This paper discusses the potential contribution of parliamentary institutions and networks to the democratization of global economic governance. It places the analysis in the context of the larger debate on the democratic deficit of international economic institutions, in particular the WTO. On...

In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary...

As a result of the prevailing governance structure, economic policy in democracies usually suffers from specific deficiencies. Among these are the predominance of distributive over efficiency objectives, the neglect of long-run effects, and the lack of or biased use of expert knowledge in the...

A country's form of government has important economic and political consequences, but the determinants that lead countries to choose either parliamentary or presidential systems are largely unexplored. This paper studies this choice by analyzing the factors that make countries switch from...

During the last decade unicameral proposals have been put forward in fourteen US states. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework casting some lights on the drawbacks of bicameral state legislatures and on the effects of the proposed constitutional reforms. In a setting where lawmakers...