I have not read the book, which is a collection of papers by James Buchanan and Richard Musgrave (The MIT Press 1999). The position one takes on public finance issues depends a lot on two main foci of attention: (1) rules vs outcomes, and (2) the nature of the sate:
From a review of the book by Stephen Slivinski
. . . the important point that readers will take away from the exchange within the pages of this book is that there is a fundamental difference in the public finance literature about what legitimizes government and how best to construct one that transcends the abuses of majoritarian impulses. The view of government as benevolent redistributor, which Musgrave seems to favor, is as old as the European finance models that he is steeped in. And Buchanan’s cogent and pow- erful criticism of that school is worthy of the Nobel Prize received for it.
Heinemann (2008), using data from the World Values Survey, finds empirical evidence in support of a deterioration of social norms by the welfare state: Both higher transfers and waves of high unemployment in macroeconomic downturns result in an increased willingness to claim transfers, even if one is legally not eligible to do so. (pp. 33-34).
The paper by Jan Schnellenbach & Christian Schubert is here.
HT: Matthew Baker.
Interesting theory:
The conventional wisdom that the poor are less likely than the rich to vote is based upon research on voting behavior in advanced industrialized countries. However, in many places the relationship between turnout and socioeconomic status is reversed. We argue that the potential tax exposure of the rich explains the positive relationship between income and voting in some places and not others. Where the potential tax exposure of the rich is high, they have more of an incentive to participate in politics. Therefore, where states have the capacity to tax the rich, politicians use fiscal policy to gain support. Using survey data from a wide range of developed and developing countries, we demonstrate that the rich turn out to vote at higher rates than the poor where the state has the bureaucratic capacity to tax the rich and where the political preferences of the rich and poor diverge.
From a new paper by Kasara & Suryanarayan (March 2013). The full title is "When Do the Rich Vote Less than the Poor and Why? Explaining Turnout Inequality Across the World."
Researchers have scrutinized foreign aid’s effects on poverty and growth, but anecdotal evidence suggests that donors often use aid for other ends. We test whether donors use bilateral aid to influence elections in developing countries. We find that recipient country administrations closely aligned with a donor receive more aid during election years, while those less aligned receive less. Consist with our interpretation, this effect holds only in competitive elections, is absent in U.S. aid flows to non-government entities, and is driven by bilateral alignment rather than incumbent characteristics.
That is from a new paper in the AER by Faye & Niehaus (December 2012). The authors explain (p. 2):
. . . In these [2006 Palestinian] elections the U.S.-backed incumbent Palestinian Authority (P.A.) faced strong opposition from Hamas. In the weeks preceding the elections the United States Agency for International Development Assistance (USAID) funded several development programs in Palestine including the distribution of free food and water, a street-cleaning campaign, computers for community centers, and even a national youth soccer tournament.
The full paper (draft: June 2011).
There has been a longstanding concern about inequality in the representation of interests by organized groups and lobbyists in American politics. The lobbying community in Washington is dominated by corporations, trade associations, and professional associations. In Lobbying and Policy Change, Baumgartner and colleagues find that interest group resources are not a very reliable predictor of policy outcomes. This might lead some to conclude that inequality in interest group representation is not a major problem for American democracy. However, Baumgartner and colleagues suggest that inequality in interest group representation presents itself at the agenda-setting stage. They find that the public agenda is quite different from the lobbying agenda. That is, the types of issues that are most important to the public differ from the types of issues that lobbyists bring to the attention of government officials. We examine public opinion data in more detail to determine if there is greater congruence between the public agenda and lobbying agenda for certain publics (e.g., high SES citizens). We find additional evidence that the lobbying agenda does not reflect the policy priorities of the public. However, we find relatively few differences between the policy priorities of low-income and high-income Americans, suggesting that the lobbying agenda fails to represent the concerns of all income groups.
This is the abstract of an interesting new paper by Rowly and Houser on G. Tullock in the latest number of Public Choice:
Gordon Tullock is a founding father of public choice. In an academic career that has spanned 50 years, he forged much of the research agenda of the public choice program and he founded and edited Public Choice, the key journal of public choice scholarship. Tullock, however did much more than this. This Special Issue of Public Choice honors Gordon Tullock in precisely the manner that he most values: the creation of new ideas across the vast range of his own scholarly interests.
