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Electoral institutions shape the incentives of governments to rely on distributive measures and to comply with international obligations because of the misalignment they may engender between the collective objectives of a government party and the individual objectives of its members in the legislature. We use this argument to explain the puzzle of unlawful state aid measures in the European Union (EU). Existing theories of EU compliance and implementation offer no convincing explanation to their persistence and patterns. Using data from 2000 to 2012, we find that an increase of district magnitude improves compliance. However, compliance decreases with higher magnitude where either party leaders have no control over the ballot rank or other electoral rules strengthen the incentives to search for a personal vote. We also provide evidence for the effects of electoral reforms on compliance. These results have implications for the broader literature on compliance with international regimes.

The impact of corruption charges on the electoral performance of parties is conditioned by specific institutional factors. This article shows the extent to which the effects of political corruption depend on the control that party leaders exercise over the ballot. It is argued that voters might abstain or support other lists if they cannot select individual candidates to revitalize the reputation of the political party. Employing data on judicial investigations in Italy from 1983 to 2013, we provide evidence of the role of electoral rules and intra-party xcandidate selection in shaping the relationship between corruption and voters’ behaviour. Parties implicated in corruption or related crimes experience a loss of votes when they compete under a closed list formula or when the candidate selection process is strongly centralized.

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The present analysis investigates the rationale for delegation to domestic institutions in the EU. This issue is prominent in merger control, where the Commission can refer the assessment of concentrations between undertakings to national competition authorities. We argue that the purpose of referrals is to reduce the decision-making costs. Employing data from 2004 to 2012, we show that the recourse to national authorities is associated with taking advantage of agency expertise and shifting the blame for policy failures. Conversely, referrals are not grounded on the need to reduce the number of pending cases. These results hold when controlling for confounding factors such as the involvement of non-EU countries, the different commissioners for competition, and sensitive economic sectors.