The first chapter shows that the ideological dimension is the key determinant of the decision to vote. We do so with a unique data base that analyses the elections in 16 OECD multi-party system countries for a period of time that spans from the 1979 to the 1995. This data set contains information on the ideological position taken by each party competing in an election and the self-declared ideological position of the citizens on the same ideological continuum. We estimate that the likelihood of voting is higher when there is a close distance between a voter’s bliss point and the preference of the nearest party. We also find that ideological location of the second nearest party matters for the decision to vote. Moreover, our results exclude that the ideology of political parties other than the first two nearest to the preferences of the voters are significant for the decision to vote. The second chapter focuses on why turnout varies across elections and across districts. A simple micro-founded measure of policy based party competition is developed and calculated for every district at every election in 15 European countries over the period 1947-1998. Our results suggest that a large proportion of the within-district inter-election variance in turnout levels can be attributed to differences in the intensity of district-level of political competition. The third chapter extends the research on happiness and spatial theory of voting by exploring whether the ideological vote affects the level of subjective well-being in the society. I rely my analysis on data on the subjective life satisfaction of a large sample of individual over 50 elections in 15 OECD countries. The results of the analysis lend firm support to the dominant role of ideological vote in the well-being of the individuals. Specifically, I demonstrate that subjective life satisfaction is negatively affected by the presence of strategic voting. The results also suggest that the level of well-being is lower when the citizen votes strategically for a political party that has not won the electoral competition. Moreover, when I account for the political affiliation, the right-wing voters are more susceptible to ideological consideration than the left wing one. My results are robust to different measures of strategic voting.

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Territorial justice in public finance concerns the equal treatment of those in equal need irrespective of geographic location. This thesis e~aluates and explains the spatially equalizing effects of post-communist Russia's fiscal system for the case of primary and secondary education in 1997-2004 in the context of theory and international experience. The key challenges to the Russian school education - under-funding and the inefficient input-based system of public budgeting - have been aggravated by the rising regional inequalities in school fmance allocation. C) The new federal system of formulae-based intergovernmental fiscal transfers introduced in the late 1990s with an official aim of the equalization of regional fiscal capacities to provide basic public services has improved school finance equity only modestly. The detailed analysis of the policy initiatives of the reform pioneer region of Samara initiateq in 1998 has also revealed somewhat controversial results. Although Samara's new scheme for school finance and administration improved the efficiency of service provision, territorial, social and economic inequalities coupled with school elitism complicated equity improvements. Despite the fact that the links between fiscal decentralization and regional evol~tions are not direct, decentralization can either diminish or enforce spatial inequality. The empirical evidence --' suggests that in the Russian case, decentralization per se has not been the cause for the growth of ) spatial disparities. Rather post-communist Russia's uneven economic geography has been the I main reason for the lack of territorial equality. Although fiscal equalization is not supposed to explicitly deliver regional economic convergence, Russian fiscal federalist relations have done little to create the conditions for balanced regional development. The advanced by international standards formulae for fiscal equalization has not been accompanied by the changes in the allocation of highly non-transparent non-equalization grants, the elimination of barriers to the spatial mobility of population, and, most importantly, improvements in regional and local fmancial and administrative decision-making autonomy. Given Russia's economic geography it is very unlikely that further political, administrative and fiscal centralization will be able to moderate spatial forces working toward greater territorial injustice.

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