Districting and Government Overspending

By R. Baqir. Journal of Political Economy, 2001

225 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Theories of government spending driven by a common‐pool problem in the fiscal revenues pool predict that greater districting of a political jurisdiction raises the scale of government. This paper presents evidence on this and related predictions from a cross section of city governments in the United States. The main finding is that, when other plausible determinants of government spending are controlled for, greater districting leads to a considerably greater scale of government activity. The results also show that at‐large electoral systems do not, and forms of government that concentrate powers in the office of the executive do, break this relationship.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d73411e94df624f6ba1cb9b137a0870de2a3098

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Citations in the corpus

Does the Size of the Legislature Affect the Size of Government? Evidence from Two Natural Experiments (2012, unknown): “…those studies based on U.S. data the mapping between the number of districts and the number of legislators is far from one to one.16 For example, in Baqir (2002) 14 Other recent papers that have the same common-pool mechanism at their heart include Chari et al. (1997) and Velasco (1999) 15 The…”
Public good provision under dictatorship and democracy (2009, background): “For empirical evidence on links between public good spending and variations in democratic institutions, see Lott and Kenny (1999), Persson and Tabellini (1999, 2000, 2004), Milesi-Ferretti et al. (2002) and Baqir (2002).”
Just Rewards? Local Politics and Public Resource Allocation in South India (2012, unknown): “The findings are mixed – see, for example, Baqir (2002), Bradbury and Stephenson (2003) and MacDonald and Sass (2005).”
Merged municipalities, higher debt: on free-riding and the common pool problem in politics (2010, unknown): “, Gilligan and Matsusaka (1995, 2001), Bradbury and Crain (2001), Baqir (2002), and Bradbury and Stephenson (2003).”
Legislative Representation, Bargaining Power and the Distribution of Federal Funds: Evidence from the US Congress* (2008, result): “Baqir (2002) finds a positive relationship between the size of city councils and public spending, and Gilligan and Matsusaka (1995) and Bradbury and Crain (2001) find similar results for legislatures in US states.”
Constitutions and Economic Policy (2004, background): “This conclusion is 5 Variables held constant in the underlying regressions include per capita income, the quality and age of democracy, openness of the economy, the size and age composition of the population, plus indicators for federalism, OECD membership, colonial history and continental location.”