Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Using a distributive politics bargaining model that allows for pork-barrel (i.e., inefficient) projects, I demonstrate that legislatures tend to prefer open, or unrestricted, amendment rules on spending bills, while agenda setters prefer closed, or restrictive, rules. This result contrasts with Baron and Ferejohn’s (1989) seminal work on bargaining, which finds that closed rules are preferred both by the legislature as a whole and the proposer. The model is applied to the problem of legislative rule enforcement by tying the agenda setter’s adherence to a spending limit to the legislature’s granting of a closed rule on the proposal. I find that endogenous enforcement of a spending limit is possible if the voting rule is a simple majority (or close to it). This enforcement mechanism tends to fail for supermajority rules. The approach in this paper sheds new light on the design and enforcement of budget rules in legislatures.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper develops a theory of the political calculus behind macroeconomic policymaking in a financially globalized world. It seeks to explain a fascinating puzzle: why has much of Latin America’s left maintained a commitment to macroeconomic orthodoxy? Employing elections as my unit of analysis, I challenge the conventional claim the chief executives engineer an economic boom to win elections. Rather, I argue that in a financially globalized world, politicians face greater policymaking constraints that stem from their exposure to international debt markets and an increasingly sophisticated electorate. They often prefer to use macroeconomic discipline to signal their competence to both investors and the electorate, particularly in light of past hyperinflation and debt crises. Ironically, politicians who presumably face fewer institutional checks and balances, constrain their own executive power to demonstrate macroeconomic policy accountability.

Supporting Publications:
Supporting Document

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Previous explanations of the causes of shifts in national policy mood, conceived of on a left-right dimension, have been mostly economic. In this paper, we attempt to move beyond economic factors affecting policy mood of the citizens in Western democracies. Specifically, we analyze the relationships between public policy moods and national economies, governmental ideology, previous public policy moods, and social and military spending. We further investigate how these relationships are conditioned/modified by the ideology of the incumbent governments. Our analysis includes 21 industrialized, well established democracies for the period of 1950 through 1998. We find that the national policy mood is negatively related to the current government ideology, confirming the “reaction hypothesis” primarily shown in American politics literature previously. We also conclude that improving (declining) national economy tends to cause a leftward (rightward) shift in policy mood. Additionally, the direction of this effect is influenced by the ideology of the incumbent government. Testing for our hypothesis that increasing social spending causes a rightward movement in national policy mood and a decrease in social spending sends policy mood to the left yields only “weak” support. Even so, we find no evidence that these influences are conditioned by government ideology. Conversely, we find strong evidence that an increase in military spending swings policy mood to the left, while a decrease moves it back to the right. And, as is the case with economic variables, military spending is conditioned by government ideology.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: I use state-level fiscal data from 1969-1998 to analyze the partisan, institutional, and economic determinants of government spending. Empirical tests support the game theoretic prediction that spending is lower in states with enforceable budget caps and also demonstrate that states extract less of each new dollar of personal income when a budget cap is in effect. There is limited support for a predicted link between gubernatorial ideology and spending. A surprising result is that other partisan variables like divided government and party control
of state legislatures tend to have little or no direct effect, with political institutions and economic indicators explaining
much of the variation in state spending.