Suchergebnisse

We examine moonlighting by politicians in Germany. In July 2007, the German Supreme Court adjudicated that members of parliament (MPs) have to publish details of their outside earnings. Using panel data models, we investigate how outside earnings are correlated with absence and parliamentary activity. The results do not indicate that outside earnings are correlated with absence rates and speeches; but they do suggest that outside earnings are somewhat negatively correlated with oral contributions, interpellations, and group initiatives. We propose that the results for Germany do not corroborate evidence on other countries such as Italy because party discipline, institutions, and political cultures differ across countries.

This thesis comprises four empirical research papers in the area of political economics. While the first two chapters deal with questions related to direct democracy, chapters three and four are about topics linked to representative democracy. Please see pages 135 - 138 for a detailed summary of the chapters. ; Diese Dissertation enthält vier empirische Forschungsarbeiten im Bereich der politischen Ökonomie. Die ersten beiden Kapitel behandeln das Thema der direkten Demokratie, während Kapitel drei und vier einzelne Fragestellungen zur repräsentativen Demokratie beantworten. Eine ausführliche Inhaltsangabe der einzelnen Kapitel befindet sich auf den Seiten 135 - 138.

It is a longstanding debate whether members of parliament (MPs) should be allowed to follow sideline jobs in addition to their mandate. Critics claim that politicians already face binding time constraints and that moonlighting might lead to a neglect of inner-parliamentary duties. The purpose of this study is therefore to investigate whether politicians with more sideline jobs show less effort inside parliament. To address this question, I collected novel data on German members of parliament from 2009-2013. Using a selection on observables approach that controls for legislator ability, I find that higher outside earnings are associated with a significantly lower attendance rate as well as fewer speeches, oral contributions, interpellations and group initiatives. These results are robust to a variety of tests. My findings suggest that time caps on moonlighting along with stricter disclosure rules for outside activities might be necessary.

Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of direct democratic instruments such as citizen initiatives. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiative petitions. Based on municipal-level data for Germany, we make use of changes in signature requirements that occur at specific population thresholds to build an identification strategy using a regression discontinuity design. We find that reducing the signature requirement by 1 % point increases the probability of observing an initiative petition in a given city-year by 8-10 % points. Adapted from the source document.

In this short note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the social democrats generally profit from higher voter turnout at the expense of the conservatives. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using election day rain as an instrumental variable. Our particular contribution is the comparison of municipal and state elections.

Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of public referenda. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiatives. Based on municipality-level data for Germany, we make use of legislative changes at specific population thresholds to build an identification strategy using a regression discontinuity design. We find that reducing the signature requirement by 1 percentage point increases the probability of observing an initiative by 8-10 percentage points. The results are robust to a variety of tests. Importantly, we go into great detail to rule out other potential confounders.