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What political factors influence the allocation of economic patronage in democracies? Answering this question is vital to improving our knowledge of how states and markets interact. In this paper, I argue that changing levels of party centralization can drive important changes in the allocation of state largess. When governing parties are centralized, national party leaders will control sources of patronage, targeting benefits to particularly influential regions and industries. By contrast, when governing parties are decentralized, influential sub-national party leaders will advocate for their constituents, allocating patronage evenly through a national logroll. I find evidence for these relationships by comparing India's distribution process for industrial licenses and government finance under a decentralized Congress Party (1954-61) to its distribution process under a centralized Congress Party (1969-75). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are few better ways to understand the behavior of states than to examine how they spend money. Why might a democratically elected government choose to run a sustained fiscal deficit in the face of many potential drawbacks? In this paper, I contribute in two important ways to our understanding of the political causes of deficit spending. I present a new theory linking party characteristics with fiscal outcomes, and I test that theory (and, preliminarily, other theories) with a broad empirical model of all democracies from 1975-2000 (continent on data availability). In developing my theory, I focus on three internal characteristics of political parties – their organizational centralization, the stability of their linkages to the electorate, and the breadth of those linkages. Centralized governing parties with stable linkages to a broad electoral base will, I argue, be more likely to embody the national interest in balanced budgets rather than the particularistic interest in deficit spending. I test these contentions with a dataset of 902 observations coming from 73 different countries for an average of 12 years each. The quantitative analysis strongly supports the role of two of the three party characteristics that I highlight – organizational centralization and linkage breadth – on budget outcomes. It also confirms the influence of executive constraint on deficit spending, while failing to support the importance of ideology, political-business cycles, or government fragmentation. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more and more of the world's states devolve power and resources to sub-national governments, decentralization is emerging as one of the most important global trends of the new century. Yet there is still no consensus on the benefits of decentralization and on how to design institutions that can realize these benefits in individual countries. In this paper, we investigate the political conditions under which this trend towards decentralization will improve the delivery of public goods. We begin by incorporating insights from political science and economics into a rigorous and formal extension of the "decentralization theorem". This theorem, which points to the efficiency benefits of sub-national goods provision, was first developed by Oates (1972) and has influenced virtually all of the recent literature. Our extension suggests that the interaction of democratic decentralization (i.e. the creation of popularly elected sub-national governments) and party centralization (i.e. the power of national party leaders to nominate candidates for sub-national office) will produce the best outcomes for public service delivery. Democratic decentralization creates the accountability necessary for public goods provision, while party centralization increases the government's incentives to provide public goods with spillover effects. To test this argument empirically, we make use of a new dataset of sub-national political institutions created for this project. Up to this point, scholars interested in sub-national political institutions have been forced to focus on single cases (especially the United States) or to assume that national level political institutions are replicated at the sub-national level. Our new dataset allows us to examine how the structure of municipal politics influences educational outcomes (our proxy for public goods provision) in nearly 150 countries across nearly 25 years. This empirical analysis, to our knowledge the broadest quantitative exploration of sub-national politics in the literature, provides strong but not absolute support for our theoretical expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]