• Bargaining Complexity and the Duration of Government Formation: Evidence from Flemish Municipalities 

      Blockmans, Tom; Geys, Benny; Heyndels, Bruno; Mahieu, Bram (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2016)
      Government formation processes have attracted a substantial amount of scholarly attention. Yet, only few scholars try to explain the duration of government formations. This article extends the latter literature by examining ...
    • Costs of taxation and the size of government 

      Andersen, Jørgen Juel (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2012)
      Existing theory on the form of government suggests that a parliamentary system promotes a larger size of government than does a presidential system. This paper extends the existing theory by allowing for distortionary ...
    • (De)Centralization and voter turnout: theory and evidence from German municipalities 

      Michelsen, Claus; Boenisch, Peter; Geys, Benny (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2014)
      A vast academic literature illustrates that voter turnout is affected by the institutional design of elections (e.g., compulsory voting, electoral system, postal or Sunday voting). In this article, we exploit a simple ...
    • Do re-election probabilities influence public investment? 

      Fiva, Jon H.; Natvik, Gisle J. (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2013)
      An insight from dynamic political economy is that elected officials may use state variables to affect the choices of their successors. We exploit the staggered timing of local and national elections in Norway to investigate ...
    • Partial Fiscal Decentralization and Subnational Government Fiscal Discipline: Empirical Evidence from OECD Countries 

      Asatryan, Zareh; Feld, Lars P.; Geys, Benny (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2015)
      Recent theoretical research suggests that financing sub-national governments’ expenditure out of own revenue sources is linked to more responsible budgeting, because the financial implications of spending decisions then ...
    • Partisan conflicts and parliamentary dominance: the Norwegian political business cycle 

      Helland, Leif (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2011)
      The arcticle explores the political business cycle in Norway from the early 1980s onwards. It is shown that unemployment growth is related to uncertainty about likely parliamentary majorities, and to the level of political ...
    • Party leaders and voter responses to political terrorism 

      Geys, Benny; Hernæs, Øystein Marianssønn (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2020)
      In this article, we study the political implications of terrorism rooted in extremist political ideologies. Our data uniquely allow studying the potential role of party leader evaluations on political outcomes, including ...
    • Patriotism, taxation and international mobility 

      Qari, Salmai; Konrad, Kai A.; Geys, Benny (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2012)
      Patriotic citizens intrinsically prefer living in their native country compared to living in the Diaspora. In this paper, we analyze the consequences of such a “patriotic lock-in” in a world with international migration ...
    • Persistent rent extraction 

      Helland, Leif; Sørensen, Rune Jørgen (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2012)
      Representative democracy does not necessarily eliminate political corruption. Existing models explain the survival of rent-taking politicians by ideological divisions in the electorate and/or informational asymmetries. The ...
    • Political competition, party polarization, and government performance 

      Sørensen, Rune Jørgen (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2014)
      Lack of party competition may impair government efficiency. If the voters are ideologically predisposed to cast their vote in favor of one political party, they may reelect an underperforming incumbent. Party polarization ...
    • Public-private political cleavage: what happens after retirement? 

      Rattsø, Jørn; Sørensen, Rune Jørgen (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2016)
      Political preferences of public employees differ from those of workers in the private sector. The former are more likely to vote for left-wing parties and orient themselves ideologically towards the left. This political ...
    • Will you still trust me tomorrow? The causal effect of terrorism on social trust 

      Geys, Benny; Qari, Salmai (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2017)
      How do people respond to terrorist events? Exploiting the timing of the 2010 wave of the annual ‘Society Opinion Media’ survey in Sweden, we study the causal effect of the Stockholm bombings of 11 December 2010 on Swedish ...