We analyze voter preferences for eight General Elections for the Danish parliament by using survey data to investigate the possible presence of five types of social choice paradoxes that may occur in list systems of proportional representation. Two serious paradoxes fail to manifest themselves,...

We assess the influence of moneyed interests on legislative decisions. Our theory predicts that the vote outcome distribution and donation flows in a legislature feature a discontinuity at the approval threshold of bills if special interest groups are involved in vote buying. Testing the...

This paper examines the impact of regional development on democracy building in the Czech Republic following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the autocratic communist regime in 1989. By exploiting the variation in regional development arising from the economic transition process, we identify...

We consider a model with a politician facing a multi-task problem while in office. The reelection mechanism distorts the allocation of effort in favor of tasks whose outcomes can be measured more precisely than others. We show that a hierarchy of elections and incentive contracts can alleviate...

We theoretically and experimentally study voter behavior in a setting characterized by plurality rule and mandatory voting, where voters choose from three options. We are interested in the occurrence of strategic voting in an environment where Condorcet cycles may occur. In particular, we focus...

We study experimentally the effectiveness of communication in common value committees exhibiting publicly known heterogeneous biases. We test models assuming respectively self-interested and strategic, joint payoff-maximizing and cognitively heterogeneous agents. These predict varying degrees of...

Liquid Democracy is a voting system touted as the golden medium between representative and direct democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters can delegate their votes as they wish. The outcome can be superior to simple majority voting, but even when experts are correctly identified,...