Lottery-Based Elections, Power Monopolization, and Urban Development: The Case of Swiss City-States, 1666–1794
研究早期现代瑞士城邦如何通过抽签选举制度应对议会权力垄断，发现该制度改善了政治席位分配公平性，并促进了贸易税收、贸易量和基础设施支出。
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 systems 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.