Lottery-Based Elections, Power Monopolization, and Urban Development: The Case of Swiss City-States, 1666-1794
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Jonas M. Geweke, University of Zurich (Switzerland)
Version: View help for Version V2
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Project Citation:
Geweke, Jonas M. Lottery-Based Elections, Power Monopolization, and Urban Development: The Case of Swiss City-States, 1666-1794. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2024-08-14. https://doi.org/10.3886/E208361V2
Project Description
Summary:
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Early modern urban parliaments suffered an increasing monopolization of political power that hampered urban development. To combat power monopolization, some Swiss city-states reformed their election system by randomly selecting political representatives from a pre-elected pool of candidates. We implement a difference-in-differences design and find that lottery-based election systems improved the equality of distribution of political seats within parliaments. Lottery-based elections also had positive effects on trade tax revenues, trade volumes, and infrastructure expenditures. We explain this finding by showing that lottery-based election systems fostered the election of merchants to top political positions.
Funding Sources:
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Swiss National Science Foundation (192372)
Scope of Project
Subject Terms:
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Economic History
Geographic Coverage:
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Switzerland
Time Period(s):
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1666 – 1794
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