Public Choice最新文献

Whether cities can provide critical public services and infrastructure depends on their fiscal health or the ability to pay for different service responsibilities and meet other financial obligations. In this study, we explore a long-simmering controversy in the study of local politics and public finance: does mayoral partisanship matter for city fiscal health? To answer this question, we use audited financial data from 2004 to 2016 for U.S. municipalities with a population of 50,000 or more to measure a critical dimension of fiscal health, which is budgetary solvency. Employing difference-in-differences regression with staggered treatment adoption, our findings reveal that cities switching from a Democratic to a Republican mayor experience improvements in budgetary solvency. However, the effect does not last and dissipates as the next election approaches, indicating the existence of a political fiscal health cycle. The effects of partisanship are more evident when elections are not competitive. We also find that Republican mayors in mayor-council cities exhibit better budget outcomes than Republican mayors in council-manager cities.

Research has pointed towards U.S. state officials setting COVID regulations based on their constituents’ political affiliation. But a further explanation is needed as prior to 2020, U.S. voters did not choose their political party in accord with how they thought politicians would act in a pandemic. In contrast, other papers have found that people with higher risk preferences took fewer mitigating actions during COVID. Building on these results and the public choice view that political markets lack a dynamic-feedback process, this paper hypothesizes that upcoming elections incentivized state officials to partially set regulations in congruence with their constituents’ demonstrated risk preferences. The hypothesis is tested with a balanced panel of all U.S. states over seven time periods ranging from April until shortly before the 2020 election. A log-linear hybrid model finds a negative relationship between risky actions and the stringency of COVID regulations at the between-state level. The relationship is statistically and regulatorily significant while controlling for relevant time-varying and time-invariant health, political, and economic measures. Multiple robustness tests confirm these results, including instrumenting people’s risky actions. At the within-state level, regulations only varied with changes in revealed risk preferences when governors faced impending feedback from a reelection contest. Republican governors running for reelection decreased regulations when revealed risk taking increased whereas their Democratic counterparts responded by increasing regulations. In states without a gubernatorial election, regulations show little responsiveness to changes in risk taking, corroborating the public choice viewpoint.

Authoritarian populism has become an increasingly prevalent subtype of hybrid regime and is characterized by weakened democratic institutions and a leader who relies on populist appeals. Authoritarian populist regimes limit citizens’ freedom, undermine accountability and the rule of law, and are likely to be more corrupt than democratic regimes. Nevertheless, certain authoritarian populist regimes appear to enjoy broad popular support. Based on the European Social Survey database and my calculations of respondents’ personal income tax rates, I investigate the factors that influenced voters’ support for Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary from 2010 to 2020, which may be considered an exemplary case of an autocratic populist regime. The analysis shows that voters’ support for the government was influenced by their perceptions of the economy and government performance, political beliefs (i.e., policy congruence and ideology), and basic human values (i.e., self-transcendence and conservation). By contrast, changes in voters’ individual economic conditions were not found to be associated with their support for the government. The findings indicate that, in addition to explanations of government support that specifically focus on hybrid regimes, economic voting theory, which originated from and has typically been applied in democratic contexts, also provides viable explanations for understanding support for authoritarian populist regimes. More broadly, the findings also lend support to the altruistic and expressive voter hypotheses.

This paper studies the relationship between the size of a jurisdiction and how corrupt its citizens perceive officials to be. The relationship may a priori be driven by four distinct mechanisms: (i) larger communities have more officials, thereby making it more likely at least one official is corrupt; (ii) larger communities have a larger budget, thereby offering more opportunity for corruption; (iii) monitoring officials is costlier in larger communities; and (iv) the public is less likely to have contact with officials in larger communities, which raises citizens’ suspicion. First, using cross-country analysis, we establish that people perceive more corruption in countries with larger populations. We then test this stylized fact using French survey data on the perception of municipal government corruption. We again observe that the perception of corruption increases with population size. This result is robust to a series of checks and many confounding factors. Moreover, our results hold across two distinct periods and for another administrative unit, departments. Finally, we report suggestive evidence that the stylized fact is driven by mechanisms (i) and (ii), but not by (iii) and (iv).

How do special interests react to an increase in their regulatory burden? In this paper, I use a shock to the regulatory environment by analyzing state-level enforcement of the Clean Air Act during the fracking boom. First, I show that fracking is associated with an increase in state regulatory activities for non-energy-related industries, generating regulatory spillovers to firms unrelated to fracking. Using the fact that fracking had regulatory spillovers to other industries, I use the presence of fracking as an instrument for environmental regulation for non-energy-related firms. I find that increased environmental enforcement is associated with an increase in state campaign contributions going to Republicans, and particularly to legislative races in competitive districts. These results provide some of the first evidence that changes in the regulatory environment can spur private sector mobilization with the potential to affect broader areas of policy through its electoral consequences.

This article investigates the relationship between the coalitional structure of revolutionary movements and revolutionary outcomes. Noting the chimerical nature of revolutionary coalitions, it introduces readers to the concept of ‘movement split’: the moment in a revolutionary process when, once a regime is overthrown, the revolutionary coalition fractures into ‘radicals’, who seek further, social revolution; and ‘conservatives’ who are satisfied with a limited, political revolution. By means of a comparative historical analysis of the 1789 French Revolution and 2011 Egyptian Revolution, it analyses the role of coalition structure in determining revolutionary outcomes after movement split. In both cases, the distribution of mobilizing capacity between radicals and conservatives was the key factor determining whether each revolutionary movement came to pursue a ‘political’ or ‘social’ revolutionary’ program. Where conservatives retained control over mobilization, advancement of the revolutionary process ended once political revolution was achieved, while when radicals retained control, a process of social revolution was undertaken. Thus, when seeking to anticipate the trajectory of change an emergent revolutionary movement is liable to undertake, it is fruitful to examine whether it is radicals or conservatives who control its principal mobilizing structures.

This special issue reflects one of the first systematic inquiries into the effects of revolutions on institutional change, a topic previously explored only tangentially across diverse social science domains. It fosters interdisciplinary discourse on revolutionary outcomes among economists, political scientists, sociologists, and economic historians informed by the public choice research program. The issue is divided into two parts, the first of which focuses on regime overthrow and institutional transformation and the second of which focuses on rational-choice theoretic analyses of revolution and its results. By employing analytical narratives and comparative analyses of contemporary and historical revolutions, the issue advances both theoretical and empirical understandings of revolution, revolutionary dynamics, and their implications.

As technology-assisted decision-making is becoming more widespread, it is important to understand how the algorithmic nature of the decision maker affects how decisions are perceived by those affected. We use an online experiment to study the preference for human or algorithmic decision makers in redistributive decisions. In particular, we consider whether an algorithmic decision maker will be preferred because of its impartiality. Contrary to previous findings, the majority of participants (over 60%) prefer the algorithm as a decision maker over a human—but this is not driven by concerns over biased decisions. However, despite this preference, the decisions made by humans are regarded more favorably. Subjective ratings of the decisions are mainly driven by participants’ own material interests and fairness ideals. Participants tolerate any explainable deviation between the actual decision and their ideals but react very strongly and negatively to redistribution decisions that are not consistent with any fairness principles.