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Comments on an article about the essential problems in the conceptualization of the U.S. experiment in constitutional choice. Analysis of the efficacy of constitutional forms in restraining the tyrannical exercise of political power; Discussion of the social institutions that renders the issue of constitutional choice less pressing; Problem posed by the concepts of constitutional structure and political condition.

The article lists various rules from the economist Robert D. Tollison for a knowledge-creating society, including keeping enthusiasm for new ideas, having the discipline to write and working early and often, and his belief that there is a journal for every paper.

The article comments on the proposed method to evaluate the motives behind government behavior concerning public goods in the U.S. The method is to derive results from a set of simple and largely unobjectionable propositions about public goods. The author points out that it is difficult to argue that efficiency requires uniform public provisions.

Explores the intellectual prostitution of authors. Prostitution of ideas and academic career; Role of journal editors in deciding whether an article is worth publishing or not; Effect of intellectual prostitution to suppliers and consumers.

Discusses the research of Francis Galton on the relationship between voting and robust estimation. Use of the influence curve on determining voting and estimation relationship; Suggestion on the retirement process of juries; Accuracy of the vox populi principle on estimating voter preference.

The article discusses a meeting of the Public Choice Society and Economic Science Association will be held at the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, Friday morning, March 9 through Sunday noon, March 11, 2001.

Over the last four decades, banking crises around the globe have become longer. Along with the unprecedented government responses to the Great Recession of 2007–2008, protracted financial crises have led scholars to ask whether political decisions were somehow to blame. Despite growing concerns, little attention has been paid to the political and institutional determinants of financial crisis duration. This paper considers the role of these factors in determining the duration of systemic banking, currency, sovereign debt, and twin or triple coinciding crises. Relying on an extensive database of 125 countries observed over the 1976–2017 period and estimating a discrete-time duration model, we find that the electoral cycle, political ideology, majority governments, institutional quality, and central bank independence matter. This study shows that the duration dynamics of financial crises are idiosyncratic and must be examined individually. Finally, allowing for more flexible duration dependence patterns, we observe that the durations of both banking and twin or triple coinciding crises follow a nonmonotonic cubic model, while the probability of debt crisis ending declines monotonically over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the introduction of rent seeking into public choice, the research program was focused primarily on collective decision-making. The incorporation of rent-seeking into public choice shifted the emphasis of the research program toward analyzing causes of government failure. Although Gordon Tullock's 1967 article clearly lays out the concept of rent-seeking, the transformation of the public choice research program by the theory of rent-seeking did not occur until after the publication of Anne Krueger's 1974 article on the rent-seeking society. This paper explains why Krueger's presentation of the paper at the Public Choice Center at Virginia Tech was instrumental in this transformative shift in the public choice research program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Should economic policy be guided by rules? In this paper, we take the perspective of the Freiburg School and trace its argument for rule-based Ordnungspolitik back to the roots of the concept. In doing so, will not offer a comprehensive review of the literature, but argue closely along the works of Walter Eucken, whose contributions are central to understanding the founding generation of the Freiburg School. We argue that not having rules is costly and therefore that the main thrust of the Freiburg approach remains valid. Good empirical arguments can be found for pursuing a rule-based Ordnungspolitik in order to avoid the costs of discretionary policymaking. Furthermore, we argue that reliance on stable rules does not incapacitate democratic decision-making. Rules rely on democratic support, and rule-based Ordnungspolitik also leaves substantial material scope for discretionary democratic decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper asks whether Walter Eucken, the founder of German ordoliberalism, should be considered to be a proponent of authoritarian liberalism. That term originally refers to a proposal for economic liberalization advanced by Carl Schmitt in 1932. Authoritarian liberalism also could be taken to mean that Eucken favors the rule of law and economic freedoms, but rejects democratic decision making. Both possible meanings are considered. We show that Eucken is not a representative of authoritarian liberalism in either sense of the term. While Eucken and Schmitt offer similar descriptions of the entanglement of state and economy in Weimar Germany, their proposed solutions are rather different. With regard to the second meaning, we argue that Eucken's critique of democracy refers to two universally recognized problems of democratic decision making, namely interest group influence and the tyranny of the majority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis, a battle of ideas emerged over whether ordoliberalism is part of the cause or the solution of economic problems in Europe. While German ordoliberals argued that their policy proposals were largely ignored before, during and after the crisis, critics saw too much ordoliberal influence, especially in form of austerity policies. We argue that neither view is entirely correct. Instead, we observe that the battle of ideas is largely independent of the countries' actual responses to the Eurozone crisis: pragmatic self-interest on behalf of governments rather than their ideological convictions played a crucial role in political reactions. We explain this dynamic game-theoretically and highlight a number of reasons for the decoupling of the political-pragmatic debate from the ideological-academic discourse. In addition, we argue that ordoliberals themselves contributed to the ideological misuse of their own program: the ordoliberal Freiburg School ceased to be an active research program and instead grew to resemble a tradition which all too often disregarded the international academic discourse, in particular in macroeconomics. As a result, ordoliberal thinking was abused by its proponents and critics alike to emphasize their preconceived Weltanschauung (worldview). We end our paper with some thoughts on how a contemporary ordoliberalism can be constructively used to react to some of the challenges of the ongoing Eurozone crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a closer look at how the relation between liberalism and democracy has been addressed by different strands of the liberal tradition. Its purpose is to argue in support of two claims. Firstly, the claim that discourse on what the two ideals are about, and how they are related to one another, has been impaired by a failure to pay due attention to the distinction between the question of legitimacy and the question of institutional expediency. Secondly, the claim that, when the noted distinction is taken into account, the two ideals can be shown to complement each other in their outlook at how social and political life should be organized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on a paper that analyzed the level, structure and progressivity of a tax system as an interrelated set of political outcomes. Use of a principal-agent model and assumptions about what part of incomes and transactions are observable by taxing authorities at various stages of development; Argument against the influence of urbanization on income distribution.

This commentary demonstrates that Avner Greif, through his citation practices, has denied Janet Landa her full intellectual property rights with respect to her contributions to the economic analysis of trust and identity. He has done so by systematically failing to cite her published papers in this field, incidentally promoting his own publications as meriting priority. In consequence, he has effectively blocked out Janet Landa’s work from the mainstream economics literature, albeit not from the literature of law and economics, where his own writings have not been directed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note reports on the successful use of an integer-programming routine, whose details were delineated earlier, to assign panels to time slots in scheduling the annual meetings of the Public Choice Society in New Orleans in both 2005 and 2006. Each panel, or session, consists of three or four papers and belongs to a specific subject area. All submitted papers are grouped into panels in an initial step. The integer-programming routine then assigns these panels to the available time slots so as to satisfy certain constraints and, in addition, spread the panels in each subject area as evenly as possible across the time slots. Problems that arose, and possible solutions, are briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is offered to the articles within the issue, which honors political scientist Keith T. Poole, on topics, including political science methodology, roll-call voting and polarization.

This paper presents evidence that greater representation encourages electoral participation. I exploit an electoral reform in 2015 Chile that changed the extent to which each district is represented in the national congress, differentially across districts. Using voter participation in the first round of 2017's election, which included votes for president and both chambers of congress, I find that voter participation rose (or fell less) in districts where congressional representation increased. A placebo test using participation in the second round of the presidential election, which did not select the legislative branch, shows no effect of the change in parliamentary representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 local election in Hungary accelerated the trend of centralization, marked by a simultaneous reduction in available local funds and an increase in discretionary transfers to local governments. This paper, utilizing a dataset encompassing all over 3000 municipalities from 2015 to 2020, employs fixed-effect estimations and a regression discontinuity design to explore how election outcomes influenced central decisions on intergovernmental transfers. Generally, larger municipalities are more susceptible to political influence, particularly in the allocation of discretionary grants, whereas smaller settlements appear less affected by political shifts. Changes in political alignment triggered a rewarding policy for municipalities that remained or converted to aligned status, resulting in an additional 86.4% and 65.2% of discretionary funds, respectively, relative to those converting to or remaining unaligned. Our research establishes that political influence in intergovernmental transfers has intensified since 2019, offering valuable insights for the upcoming 2024 election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper endogenizes pro-entrepreneurship policies in a model where voters choose the strength of these policies and entrepreneurs generate social returns which benefit the median voter. In the model, incumbent firms who are harmed by the greater competition that this policy promotes can push back in two ways: via corruption and persuasion. Specifically, they can bribe elected politicians to break their campaign promises; and they can allocate some of their rents to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives that also benefit voters. The model predicts that corruption which weakens pro-entrepreneurship policy can be completely neutralized by a forward-looking median voter—without removing the incentive among incumbent firms to bribe politicians. In this way, endogenizing entrepreneurship policy can destroy any relationship between corruption and entrepreneurship. Corporate social responsibility initiatives modify this prediction, which provides a novel rationale for CSR that appears to be new to the literature as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to evaluate the impact of a policy that targets criminal infiltration in local governments on the provision of local public goods in Italian municipalities. Building on the theoretical framework proposed by Dal Bò (American Political Science Review 100:41–53, 2006), we use a sufficient statistic approach to describe the dynamic behaviour of local public goods when stricter law enforcement weakens criminal pressure groups. Utilizing data on the local public finances of Italian municipalities spanning from 2004 to 2015, our findings reveal that, after the dismissal of infiltrated governments, the targeted municipalities devote a larger share of resources to public goods, with an estimated increase of approximately 3.9 percentage points. Notably, this effect seems to be driven by an increase in investment of approximately 3 percentage points. Overall, our results suggest that policies targeting the problem of criminal infiltration in local governments can improve socioeconomic conditions and the well-being of local communities, by increasing investments in economically and socially relevant public goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After World War II, the quest for rights began to address the interests of particular groups, including minorities, children, women, animals, the environment, and workers. Many groups, however, continued or started to rely on the market, or private collective action, to further their interests. This paper offers a model to explain the choice between market and political action. Benefits achieved through collective action are a club good whose benefits are enjoyed and costs are borne by the group. Rights are a public good which benefits the whole class of people who qualify while its costs are borne only by the fighters, which invites free riding. Therefore, rights are more costly to achieve, but their benefits are higher because they are harder to undo and may facilitate further action; so they are chosen if their benefit/cost ratio is higher than that of collective action. The history of the American labor, black freedom, and women's movements, and their intersections, provides a good fit for the model's predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the 1998 annual meeting the European Public Choice Society at the School of Economics, Goteborg University, Goteborg, Sweden. Aim of the European Public Choice Society; Date for submission of papers; Date of the convention.

Public choice research has revealed a variety of political dilemmas associated with governance that tend to make good governance unlikely. This paper suggests that the good governments that we observe are likely to have cultural or ethical support–support that solves or ameliorates the dilemmas uncovered by public choice research. It demonstrates that five important impediments to good governance can be ameliorated by internalized ethical dispositions. Although good government is not generated by ethical conduct per se, some forms of conduct regarded as ethical are supportive of good governance and arguably prerequisites to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based primarily on personal conversations with James M. Buchanan, this paper outlines three fundamental aspects of the Italian tradition found in Buchanan's scholarship. The first is the particular emphasis on the role of the state. The second is the analysis of subjective cost. The third is the application of subjective cost to democratic public finance. This paper will focus on the latter two aspects, concentrating on two pioneering works on which Buchanan grounded two of his most important books written during the first part of his long career. The first is Public Principles of Public Debt, which profoundly was influenced by de Viti de Marco, the second is Cost and Choice, wherein along with de Viti de Marco, we find themes echoing Francesco Ferrara. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the political economy of epidemic disease. First, it outlines the incentive and information problems facing policymakers in responding to a new epidemic. Second, it considers the existence of a tradeoff between public health and freedom. Informed by a survey of the history of public health and an analysis of the response to Covid-19, it presents evidence that such a tradeoff can obtain in the short run but that, in the long run, the negative relationship is reversed and the trade-off disappears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I investigate the impact of voter turnout on top marginal tax rates in OECD countries between 1974 and 2013. I find that higher turnout leads to higher taxes for top earners, a result broadly consistent with the median voter theorem. Using novel survey data, I confirm that individuals in all but the wealthiest income bracket prefer higher taxes on the rich more than they prefer greater government spending in the economy. In line with these preferences, I find that turnout has a significantly negative effect on top income shares but no effect on the size of government or on public welfare expenditure. An instrumental variables approach confirms my findings. Overall, the paper is the first of its kind to link turnout to measures of redistribution that affect top earners and to preferences for redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relies on an incidence of environmental disaster to examine the specific objective of a regulatory agency. Leveraging the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant coal ash spill of 2008 as a natural experiment, I compare the public interest theory of regulation—maximization of net social benefits—with public choice theory, which here is the maximization of net political support. I estimate the effect of the environmental disaster on Clean Water Act monitoring in Tennessee to test one posited objective against the other. I find that regulated facilities proximate to the spill are subject to closer state-administered monitoring after the spill than regulated facilities away from the spill, even though the additional wastewater inspections do not produce positive marginal benefits for controlling coal ash. Additionally, the difference in monitoring soon normalizes to pre-spill levels, consistent with the public's interest in the event. The empirical results supply evidence that the studied regulatory agency maximizes net political support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic interests are assumed to be the leading driver of political preferences, and various empirical studies have examined how economic conditions affect political views and voting behavior. Meanwhile, populism is on the rise in European Union (EU) member countries. Against that backdrop, this paper aims to examine the effect of economic uncertainty on populist voting behavior based on a panel dataset of 24 EU countries from 1980 to 2020. We focus on whether total populist, right-wing populist, and left-wing populist votes are affected by a new indicator of economic uncertainty, namely, the World Uncertainty Index (WUI). Relying on a fixed-effects, bias-corrected least squares dummy variable estimator and instrumental variable estimations, we show that a higher WUI increases total populism and right-wing populist voting behavior. The baseline results remain consistent when dealing with potential issues of endogeneity and reverse causality, addressing omitted variable bias, and excluding outliers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several conclusions may be drawn from the information we have presented here. First and without doubt, the University of Chicago is by far the most dominant force overall, and is particularly so with respect to the production of pages and papers published in the Journal of Law and Economics. The George Mason-Virginia Tech influence is strong with respect to Public Choice, but is not, in our opinion, dominant. One does not necessarily need to be located at a large, research-oriented school in order to publish in either journal, but these schools are the source of most contributions. This is particularly true of the JLE but significantly less so for PC. The source of contributions is very broad, but top 50 institutions account for the lion's share. Contributions by persons employed at foreign institutions are important, particularly for PC. The analysis of papers and pages by degree schools of authors reveals that, while economists dominate, other disciplines are important, especially political science with respect to PC; law and business-related disciplines for JLE. These data also show that, while Chicago faculty contribute only marginally to PC, Chicago graduates exert a very strong influence. The influence of Chicago on the JLE is really notable when we rank institutions by the total contributions of both faculty and graduates, and when we rank the top 25 contributors to each journal. We hope that this paper will provide information useful to those interested, for whatever reason, in institutional and individual publishing performance with respect to the two journals. For us, the process has been difficult and time consuming, but also greatly interesting and rewarding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is possible that a budget breaking incentive scheme may not solve the problem of moral hazard in team production, due to an incentive for a principal to cheat on such an agreement. This is a problem common to incentive schemes which result in an unbalanced budget, which include among them processes designed to reveal demand for public goods. This paper shows the conditions under which cheating is possible, and designs a payment scheme for the principal which is free of any cheating incentive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we provide an overview of the influence of Tullock's work on rent-seeking in the area of economics education. After summarizing the basic rent-seeking model in both a domestic and international context, we conduct an analysis of undergraduate and graduate textbooks in public economics. We find a majority of undergraduate texts cover rent-seeking in depth, but two texts provide zero coverage. No graduate textbook surveyed mentions rent-seeking. We conclude by summarizing the economic education literature on rent-seeking, which can be divided into either classroom experiments or popular culture examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the root causes of conflict and terrorism ultimately will allow policymakers to enact measures to reduce violence's associated costs. This special issue on "Strategic and Experimental Approaches to the Study of Conflict and Terrorism" consists of papers that analyze issues related to conflict or terrorism using the tools of applied game theory or experimental economics. This introductory article provides an overview of, and explains the relationships between, the studies included in the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With participation quorums present in elections and referendums, supporters of the status quo have to decide whether to vote against the proposition or boycott it by abstaining altogether to achieve the same result. This paper examines why one strategy or the other is implemented, using data from recall elections in 376 Peruvian municipalities mandating a 50% participation quorum to validate the removal of the mayor. While instrumental rationality under situations of strategic uncertainty in competitive settings goes far in explaining the incidence of boycotts, a bounded rationality approach whereby actors rely on inferential heuristics through spatial diffusion and past experience produces similarly consistent results. Boycotts are also more likely when voter coordination is easier. Personal traits of the status quo elites, on the other hand, are irrelevant. The paper contributes to the understanding of the quorum paradox warning that measures to increase voter participation, such as the introduction of a participation quorum, may actually depress it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the targeted spending of public resources provide electoral benefits for incumbents? Despite the attention of scholars to that question, the empirical results are mixed thus far. The present paper supplies insights into the electoral benefits of discretionary funding on local elections. I study the consequences of pork-barrel politics in 7355 competitive mayoral elections in Slovakia between 2006 and 2018, finding that more grants from the central government enhance the likelihood of mayors winning reelection. The same advantage applies to mayors whose municipalities receive grants in local election years. The effects of the number of grants obtained as well as the timing of their distribution are, however, moderated by municipal population. More specifically, a larger number of grants and resources obtained near the end of the mayoral term provides electoral benefits only to small town mayors but give no advantage to the mayors of larger urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 allowed governors of the fifty states to designate low-income areas as a "Qualified Opportunity Zone" (QOZ), which entitled the investors in these QOZs to significant tax incentives. As a result, each governor's designation of QOZs provided an opportunity for the governor to introduce investments in low-income communities that would, in principle, increase economic opportunities in these areas. At the same time, each governor's decision also provided an opportunity for the governor to reward political allies, to buy voter support, and to help business interests. Which of these many factors influenced the designation of QOZs? In this paper we estimate the impact of economic and political variables on the governors' decisions to choose which areas among all eligible areas would receive QOZ status and which would not. We find that the QOZ selection process overall seems to have been relatively technocratic, with many of the strongest factors that determine QOZ designation being indicators of economic distress such as higher rates of unemployment, welfare receipt, or lower median income, all of which are consistent with the presumed goals of QOZs. Even so, we also find that political factors are significant in QOZ designation, with Democratic representation being negatively associated with QOZ nomination and with political representation by a local politician of the same party as the governor being positively associated with QOZ nomination. Of some note, we also find that areas with higher college attainment are favored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of China as a major development partner requires a reassessment of traditional donor–recipient dynamics. In addition to adopting new rhetoric like "South–South cooperation" or "Win–Win," China has eschewed classifications and practices of the traditional donors of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Development Assistance Committee. Yet the "new approach" and willful ignorance may not spare China from encountering traditional development challenges. In this paper, we consider whether Chinese development efforts have disincentivized difficult economic reforms by providing recipient governments with alternative resources for building support. Using an instrumental variable approach with panel data covering 106 countries during the 2000–2014 period, we find that when comparing Chinese development flows to several Western donors, the former's flows inhibit broader economic reform. The findings are robust to alternative specifications, data, instruments, and approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on an article about the incorporation of partisan activists into the spatial theory of electoral competition. Flaw on the assumption that an individual's utility for a political party depends only on the average of the ideal points of the party's activists.

This introduction presents a brief background of the Public Choice Society, its 50th anniversary conference, and the purpose of this symposium. This symposium consists of 13 papers within four of the main pillars of public choice: Virginia political economy, Bloomington political economy, experimental economics, and social choice. These papers pay homage to the Society's first 50 years while demonstrating the breadth and vibrancy of modern public choice scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of having a state religion on fiscal capacity. Our analysis extends the legitimization argument, which postulates that a state religion legitimizes the revenue-raising motives of the state. We then argue that the effect reduces the incentive of the state to invest in fiscal capacity. First, we build a simple theoretical model to highlight our central idea and derive our testable hypothesis. The model shows that in the presence of a legitimization effect, countries with a state religion face weaker incentives to invest in fiscal capacity, as they can raise revenue by exploiting the legitimizing power of the church. Next, we test the hypothesis in a potential outcomes model, which models the selection on observables using both recent and historical data. We show, always following our theoretical model, that countries with a state religion have lower fiscal capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine three forms of regret in relation to the UK's hugely significant referendum on EU membership that was held in June 2016. They are: (i) whether 'leave' voters at the referendum subsequently regretted their choice (in the light of the result), (ii) whether non-voters regretted their decisions to abstain (essentially supporting 'remain') and (iii) whether individuals were more likely to indicate that it is everyone's duty to vote following the referendum. We find evidence in favor of all three types of regret. In particular, leave voters and non-voters were significantly more likely to indicate that they would vote to remain given a chance to do so again; moreover, the probability of an individual stating that it was everyone's duty to vote in a general election increased significantly in 2017 (compared to 2015). The implications of the findings are discussed in the context of the referendum's outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vote buying is a form of political clientelism involving pre-electoral transfers of money or material benefits from candidates to voters. Despite the presence of secret ballots, vote buying remains a pervasive phenomenon during elections in developing countries. While prior literature has focused on how vote buying is enforced by parties and political candidates and which types of voters are most likely targeted, we know much less about the behavioral spillover effects of vote buying on citizens' demand for redistribution and contributions to the provision of public goods. In this paper, we provide evidence on how vote buying causally affects voters' candidate choice, support for redistribution, and public goods provision. Using data from a laboratory experiment in Kenya, we find that vote buying is a double-edged sword for candidates using clientelist strategies: it attracts votes from those who were offered money and accepted it, but it also leads to negative reactions from those who rejected the offer as well as those who were not offered money. In line with its effect on voting behavior, vote buying has negative effects on subjects' evaluations of the vote-buying candidate. Vote buying significantly reduces individuals' stated preferences for more government spending on police and law enforcement—yet, surprisingly, not on other welfare areas such as unemployment benefits or health. We also find that open ballots—but not vote-buying campaigns—reduce individuals' willingness to contribute to public goods provisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the midst of a health crisis, a drug in development and candidate for COVID-19 contagious disease was granted orphan-drug designation (ODD). This decision by the US Food and Drug Administration was immediately denounced as an abuse of the Orphan Drug Act (ODA). This paper outlines how this decision may be considered as the result of a complex case of capture along the regulatory process. Therefore, a case study of the remdesivir episode is conducted, combining the definition of a framework for the analysis of capture and the identification of stylized facts marking the trajectory of a repositioned drug and candidate for COVID-19. In doing so, arguments are put forward to show to what extent this granting of ODD can be described as the result of a series of captures, a case of weak capture however that calls for an amendment of the ODA to preclude drugs for contagious and communicable epidemic diseases from obtaining orphan status in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its beginnings, public choice has always had a substantial component devoted to federalism and local government decision-making. The DeVoe Moore Center at Florida State University has made the study of local government within a public choice framework a core component of its mission. The Center held a conference February 17-19, 2011, on public choice in a local government setting. This special issue of Public Choice contains the papers presented at that conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although party switching is a relatively rare event in most countries, the phenomenon is widespread in Brazil. This paper investigates the effects of party switching on political and economic variables between 2001 and 2012 using a database containing more than 4900 Brazilian municipalities. In particular, given that the conventional literature addresses party switching by legislators, this paper focuses on chief executives, specifically mayors, a subject that has not yet been explored in the literature. In this study, party switching is interpreted as a treatment effect: the treated group comprises municipalities whose mayors changed parties during their terms in office. The control group comprises municipalities with no party switching, but with similar likelihoods of being treated, as defined by propensity score matching (PSM) methods. Our results suggest that mayors belonging to the same party as the state governor or the president are less likely to switch parties. Moreover, switching from a different party to the state governor's party creates the best results for switchers who want to be renominated. Regarding reelection, our panel estimations suggest that the impact of party switching on reelection is positive. Finally, we find no statistically significant effect of party switching on the amounts of transfers received by municipalities from upper government levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite extensive econometric testing, the research literature has been unable to draw firm conclusions regarding the effect of economic globalization on government spending. This paper explores various dimensions of the wide variation in existing estimates of the globalization-spending relationship. By applying meta-analysis and meta-regression methods to a unique data set consisting of 1182 observations from 79 peer-reviewed articles, we find that the evidence rejects theoretical views predicting strong unidirectional effects of economic globalization on government spending. Once we account for publication selection bias, no evidence of a non-zero average empirical effect is found. More importantly, however, the type of government spending matters: while the results are consistent with the view that economic globalization exerts small-to-moderate downward pressure on government spending for social protection and welfare, other spending components are affected less significantly. The meta-regression analysis shows further that several factors influence the globalization-spending estimates reported in the literature, including the choice of the economic globalization indicator, details of the econometric specifications, and publication characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies indicate that the ideological stances of government parties no are longer associated with differences in total government spending. At the same time, we observe that political polarization over spending policies has deepened. This paper addresses that puzzle by analyzing government spending behavior for ten expenditure categories during both 'normal' times and periods of fiscal consolidation between 1995 and 2015 for 16 OECD countries. Our results indicate that partisan motives prevail in 'normal' times: right-wing cabinets spend more on defense and less on education and environmental protection than left-wing governments. On the other hand, in periods of fiscal adjustment, differences between left- and right-wing government expenditures can be observed mostly in different budget categories. For instance, during fiscal consolidations, right-wing governments reduce spending more than their left-wing counterparts on those categories featuring large shares of public employee compensation (i.e., public consumption spending) and small capital-expenditure shares. Hence, a central message of this paper helping to resolve the aforementioned puzzle is that ideological differences remain important after taking a comprehensive look at individual spending categories and distinguishing between periods with and without adjustments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the extent to which public interest or public choice rationales explain timber industry regulation in the Pacific Northwest. Two key regulations are examined: the listing of the Northern Spotted Owl (NSO) under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1990, and the implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) in 1994. Support for the public interest theory of regulation relies on the assumption that (A) demand for environmental protection is driven by local populations directly impacted by regulation, (B) declining timber production is driven by technological factors unrelated to environmental policy, and (C) prevention of logging under timber regulations is effective at supporting ecological diversity and endangered populations. I argue there is little evidence to support any of these propositions. In contrast, evidence suggests that various interest groups benefitted significantly from the reduction in federal timber output resulting from environmental regulation, including owners of private timberlands—particularly institutional investors such as timberland investment management organizations (TIMOs) and timberland real-estate investment trusts (REITs)—and Southern timber producers, suggesting a "bootleggers and Baptists" explanation that fits within the public choice framework. Finally, I argue that even if one accepts the public interest rationale for timber regulation, regulation of the timber industry suffers from both knowledge and incentive problems that make it unlikely to succeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recognition that government officials have politically motivated incentives to pursue new infrastructure construction at the expense of infrastructure upkeep, no prior research directly addresses how political incentives affect road maintenance separate from road construction. This paper investigates how local political incentives affect local road maintenance using unique data on completed road maintenance projects and difference-in-differences which leverages exogenous timing of mayoral elections. Since residents complain about damaged roads and can also be frustrated by travel delays caused by road maintenance, it is theoretically ambiguous how elected officials manipulate road maintenance, assuming they do so for political purposes. We show local election cycles shift road maintenance timing and location. We provide evidence that maintenance follows different patterns in mayoral election years and that maintenance is shifted around sub-city geographic units based on those units' political similarity of registered voters. A mayoral election costs $90,623 in additional road-related costs, translating to $28,093,182 per election for large cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that the racial composition of a neighborhood influences who chooses to live there. Less established is whether the political party mix of the neighborhood influences neighborhood choice. In this paper, we study racial and political neighborhood sorting, their interaction, and how they are changing over time. Our methodology involves the estimation of a conditional logit model with data on hundreds of thousands of homebuyers whose race and political affiliation are known. The neighborhood choices of homeowners categorized by race and party are explained by a typology that defines neighborhoods by their dominance of a particular party and race/ethnicity. We find that both Democrats and Republicans prefer living in a neighborhood that matches their race and political party, but both show an increased willingness to live in a non-matched neighborhood over the past decade. Our results are encouraging, suggesting that both political and racial/ethnicity neighborhood segregation may subside in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]