We investigate the relationship between political attitudes and prosociality in a survey of a representative sample of the U.S. population during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that an experimental measure of prosociality correlates positively with adherence to protective...

Rational politicians have an interest in an independent judiciary because it can potentially help them make their promises more credible. But if politicians' (short-term) preferences deviate from the dicta of the judiciary, they might also have incentives to renege on judicial independence. To...

In this paper we review both positive and normative aspects of taxation. We examine how to study why taxes and revenue structures have taken their present form and why they are used in a particular way as part of the democratic process. In addition, we also consider the classic normative...

A fundamental question about the determinants of civil conflict is the relative importance of political freedoms versus economic development. This paper takes a new approach to provide an answer by using micro-data based on surveys of revolutionary tastes of 130,000 people living in 61 nations...

This paper investigates whether EU redistributive policies improved the public attitude toward European integration, both in terms of public opinion and in terms of political preferences. We build a new dataset combining data from the European Social Survey, different data sources for political...

The determinants of government responsiveness to its citizens is a key issue in political economy. Here, we develop a model based on the solution of political agency problems. Having a more informed and politically active electorate strengthens incentives for governments to be responsive. This...

Centralisation of political decision making often fails to produce the desired results. For instance, it is frequently argued that decision making within the European Union results in overspending and overregulation in some policy areas, while too low spending and too little regulation prevails...

Hybrid governance structures between markets and hierarchies in many industries, e.g., in energy and telecommunications, challenge antitrust and regulation policy. The paper focusses on the theoretical and methodological basis provided by the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for analyzing the...

Since the early 1980s a wave of liberalizing reforms has swept over the world. While the stated motivation for these reforms has usually been to increase economic efficiency, some critics have instead inferred ulterior motives and a desire to enrich certain (already rich) people at the expense...

We survey the literature that compares the theoretical properties of different voting procedures using models of electoral competition with endogenous candidacy. In particular, we focus on the predictions made by these models regarding the number of candidates running for election and their...