With respect to the election of the U.S. President, the U.S. Constitution is vague and full of silences and gaps. Responding to the constitutional crisis of 1876, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA) attempted to offer more specific rules. The ECA was a major advance, but in important ways, it...

We study the effect of power sharing over income redistribution among different socio-economic groups in a model of redistributive politics with fairness concern. We prove that a unique pure-strategy equilibrium exists under fairly general conditions; and we show that equilibrium transfers...

We present a theoretical model of a parliamentary democracy, where party structures, government coalitions and fiscal policies are endogenously determined. The model predicts that, relative to proportional elections, majoritarian elections reduce government spending because they reduce party...

We exploit a natural experiment to study the political consequences of explicit electoral thresholds. The natural experiment in question is an electoral reform in the German federal state of Hesse. In 2001, the state parliament abolished the five percent electoral threshold for local elections....

Es wird die Grundidee einer direktdemokratischen Plattformpartei vorgestellt, dass die bei ihr registrierten Wähler über alle (wichtigen) Einzelfragen abstimmen dürfen und ihre Abgeordneten sie nicht nach Mehrheitsbeschluss, sondern proportional vertreten. Dazu werden wichtige Varianten, die...