A historical puzzle: how core principles of modern democracy influenced the evolution of government budgets. Building on Dahl’s (1971) concept of polyarchy, the study links stages of electoral contestation and suffrage inclusion to distinct patterns of state spending.
This paper draws a sharp distinction between political control of a bureaucracy and its technical capacity. The central argument is that in politically controlled bureaucracies, stronger technical capacity can facilitate corruption: capable bureaucrats use their skills to shield favored firms from competition through complex strategies that reduce the risk of detection.
This paper develops a dynamic discrete choice framework for multiple attitudes to identify which attitudes are most influential within an attitude system and to distinguish sources of stability and instability. The model accommodates ordinal attitudinal measures, time-varying gaps between interviews, and a multiple-factor structure to capture time-invariant individual traits. The authors apply the approach to five core political attitudes and to issue attitudes about government spending and immigration, preserving qualifications about the roles of permanent heterogeneity and transitory shocks.
This paper asks how U.S. military procurement during World War II affected state-level macroeconomic outcomes, using newly digitized contract records for 1940–1945 to estimate short-run multipliers and employment impacts. The study provides state-by-state evidence on personal income responses to wartime spending and reports estimates of multiplier magnitudes, implied costs per job-year, and a pattern the author calls negative scale effects.
This paper asks whether local government policy priorities shape women’s decisions to run for office and offers evidence on how municipal spending patterns relate to women’s emergence as candidates. Using Brazilian municipal-level variation, the authors link policy outputs and communal spending to the number and composition of entrants, arguing that women’s interest in running varies across place and time rather than being uniform.
This study compares party systems inside bicameral legislatures by using newly available data on upper‑chamber elections. It examines two dimensions of inter‑chamber similarity: partisan congruence (how similar party composition is between lower and upper chambers) and a new measure, nationalization congruence (how similar the geographic or national reach of parties is across the two chambers). The analysis traces how these forms of congruence vary across countries and over time and links them to the power of the upper chamber (symmetry).
This article analyzes a unique policy change in Nebraska in 1937, its switch from a bicameral to a unicameral legislature. Using the synthetic control method (SCM), which creates an artificial counterfactual state by combining other states as controls, I estimate the impact of this change on government expenditures.
Economic sanctions research suggests that sanctioned countries' overall economic costs tend to be low. This article argues, however, that even minor financial impacts can force governments to reallocate budgets significantly.