Representative versus direct democracy: Are there any expenditure differences?

voter is made indifferent with respect to the fiscal packages offered by the two types of democratic government. The empirical results in the paper find a significantly lower price of land in communities with a representative democratic form of local government, ceteris paribus, suggesting that this type of government provides a relatively undesirable or inefficient fiscal package.' This paper extends my earlier study on government structure by examining whether any expenditures differences exist across the two types of local government. The earlier study fails to identify the source of the inefficiency. Both municipal and school expenditure differences are studied for a sample of 90 jurisdictions in Connecticut with two different government forms, the opentown meeting and representative government.2