This paper uses the unique social structure of Arab communities to examine the effect of social identity on voter turnout. We first show that voters are more likely to vote for a candidate who shares their social group (signified by last name) as compared to other candidates. Using last name as...

This paper provides a comprehensive theoretical model of the political decision making process. Therein two ideologically different political parties compete for power. Their primary instrument in this competition are programmatic concessions in favor of voters and interest groups. As any...

Who will vote quadratically in large-N elections under quadratic voting (QV)? First, who will vote? Although the core QV literature assumes that everyone votes, turnout is endogenous. Drawing on other work, we consider the representativeness of endogenously determined turnout under QV. Second,...

We examine whether compulsory voting influences habit-formation in voting. In Austria, some states temporarily introduced compulsory voting in national elections. We exploit border municipalities across two states that differ in compulsory voting legislation using a difference-in-differences and...

This study extends the political science and political psychology literature on the political ideology of lawmakers by addressing the following question: How stable is a legislator's political ideology over time? In doing so, we employ Nokken-Poole scores of legislators' political ideology for...

Cities increasingly address climate change, e.g. by pledging city-level emission reduction targets. This is puzzling for the provision of a global public good: what are city governments' reasons for doing so, and do pledges actually translate into emission reductions? Empirical studies have...

We model an overlapping-generations economy with two skill levels: skilled and unskilled. The welfare-state is modeled simply by a proportional tax on labor income to finance a demogrant in a balanced-budget manner. Therefore, some (the unskilled workers and old retirees) are net beneficiaries...

We consider a framework where the optimal decision rule determining the collective choice depends in a simple way on the decision makers' posterior probabilities of a particular state of nature. Nevertheless, voting is generally an inefficient way to make collective choices and this paper sheds...