Party discipline and government spending: Theory and evidence

Party Strength, the Personal Vote, and Government Spending

“Strong” political parties within legislatures are one possible solution to the problem of inefficient universalism, a norm under which all legislators seek large projects for their districts that are paid for out of a common pool. We demonstrate that even if parties have no role in the legislature, their role in elections can be sufficient to reduce spending. If parties in the electorate are s...

Voting blocs, party discipline and party formation

I study the strategic incentives to coordinate votes in an assembly. Coalitions form voting blocs, acting as single players and affecting the policy outcome. In an assembly with two exogenous parties I show how the incentives to accept party discipline depend on the types of the agents, the sizes of the parties, and the rules the blocs use to aggregate preferences. In a game of fully endogenous...

Term Limits , Seniority , and Government Spending : Theory and Evidence from the U . S . States ∗

What is a fiscal consequence of legislative term limits? We develop a legislative bargaining model that predicts a u-shaped relationship between the level of seniority within a legislature and government spending. The size of government spending decreases as the level of seniority increases from low tomoderate, while it increases as the level of seniority increases from moderate to high. The mo...

Government Spending and Growth

Party Cohesion, Party Factions and Legislative Party Discipline in Italy

Moving beyond a unitary actor assumption that models members of a self-evidently collective entity such as a political party “as if” they all shared a single brain, this paper explores the cohesion and discipline of party legislators in multi-party systems operating under the constitutional rules of parliamentary government. We do this in the context of Italian politics, for which a consistent ...