The median voter theorem suggests that a majority vote over a linear tax-cum-transfer scheme results in egalitarianism if the median of the income distribution is poorer than the average. However, although most real-world income distributions are markedly skewed to the right, radical redistribution is rather an exception than the norm. In this paper we review the theoretical arguments that expl...

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence on the nexus between corruption and democracy. We establish a political economy model where the effect of democracy on corruption is conditional on income distribution and property rights protection. Our empirical analysis with cross-national panel data provides evidence that is consistent with the theoretical prediction. Moreover, the effe...

Can compulsory voting induce lasting changes in citizens’ voting habits? We study the long-term and spillover effects of a severely sanctioned and long-standing compulsory voting law in the Swiss canton of Vaud (1900–1970). Our findings suggest that compulsory voting strongly increases turnout in federal referendums by about 30 percentage points. However, this effect returns to zero quickly aft...

Vote-trading is common practice in committees and group decision-making. Yet we know very little about its properties. Inspired by the similarity between the logic of sequential rounds of pairwise vote-trading and matching algorithms, we explore three central questions that have parallels in the matching literature: (1) Does a stable allocation of votes always exists? (2) Is it reachable throug...

Departing from explanations that involve either altruistic or political motivations of donors, we link a donor’s willingness to give aid to economic incentives and returns. Since targeted aid might increase the returns from trade and FDI linkages for donors, there exists a non-altruistic basis for helping poor countries. We explore this idea by developing a two-country dynamic strategic interac...

In this paper we study political-economy determinants of the differentiation of environmental taxes between sectors. Using a common-agency model, we provide predictions on tax differentiation which are then tested using data from the German Ecological Tax Reform. As the reform is revenue neutral and reduces labor costs, tax differentiation is not only determined by the activity of lobby groups ...

Growing Up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy Do generations growing up during recessions have different socio-economic beliefs than generations growing up in good times? We study the relationship between recessions and beliefs by matching macroeconomic shocks during early adulthood with self-reported answers from the General Social Survey. Using time and regional variations in macroe...

Path-Breakers: How Does Women’s Political Participation Respond to Electoral Success? This paper analyzes the effect of a woman’s electoral victory on women’s subsequent political participation. Using the regression discontinuity afforded by close elections between women and men in India’s state elections, we find that a woman winning office leads to a large and significant increase in the shar...

There is a long normative ‘Social Contract’ tradition that attempts to characterize ex-post income inequalities that are agreeable to all ‘behind a veil of ignorance.’ This paper takes a similar normative approach to characterize social decision-making procedures. It is shown that quite generally some form of majority-voting is preferred to unanimity ‘behind a veil of ignorance’ whenever societ...

Satisfaction with Democracy and the Environment in Western Europe: A Panel Analysis We construct a panel of satisfaction with democracy (SWD) and economic, institutional, and environmental variables for 1990-2001 for fifteen European countries. In this sample, controlling for a number of factors, we find that average SWD is higher where (1) there exists an energy / CO2 tax, where (2) government...