Center for Political Studies
Institute for Social Research
University of Michigan
P.O. Box 1248
Ann Arbor, MI
48106-1248

Voice: (734) 763-1348
Fax: (734) 764-3341

Title
Electoral and Party Systemic Institutions, Structure, and Strategic Context: Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models of Effective Democratic Representation

PI
Robert Franzese, Jr.

Direct Source
National Science Foundation

Abstract
The starting point of much political economy is that policymakers have some combination of two goals:

1. Obtaining and retaining power (office-seeking motivations)
2. Enacting certain policies and fostering outcomes (policy- and outcome-seeking motivations)

In most polities, policymakers have essentially four classes of policy they can direct toward these goals: public-good provision, broadly targeted redistribution, narrowly targeted distribution, and rent extraction. In democracies, policymakers pursue these goals, using these tools, in the strategic context of partisan electoral competition. Substantively, this project aims to leverage our understandings of comparative democratic theory and of comparative and international political economy to build powerful, estimable, and interpretable empirical models that nonetheless reflect the multifarious and complex interactions of electoral institutions, of party-systemic features, and of the strategic shape of particular partisan-electoral contests in determining the relative weight of these four classes of policy reflected in the mix of policymaking output. In particular, it argues:

That one of the most directly observable venues for this shifting of relative emphases in effective representation and thus in policymaking activity according to these electoral and party systemic institutional, structural, and strategic settings will be in the redistributive versus distributive share of budgetary activity.

Regarding this comparative democratic political economy of budgeteering, I have begun to outline more fully the following view elsewhere:

1. that the degree to which parties are able to act as strategic units (strategic party-unity) should determine the capacity of democratic policymakers to budgeteer, i.e., to manipulate the budget for political (electoral and partisan) purposes
2. that national and district-level electoral competitiveness should determine the magnitude of their incentives to budgeteer
3. that party-system polarization, electoral-system and district magnitude, and the degree to which parties receive their electoral support as units (representational party-unity) should determine the nature of the budgeteering that serves policymakers' goals of gaining and retaining power and of producing their desired policies and outcomes.

The combination of capacity and incentive size and nature, therefore, should determine the degree and character of the budgeteering--i.e., the relative shares of public-good, partisan-redistributive, geographic-distributive, and rent-seeking activities reflected in public policies--observed across countries over time. I have now also begun to sketch the outlines of an estimable nonlinear empirical model that could shed light on the multiple and complex interactions among these many causal factors shaping fiscal policies. Moreover, in the latest version, I have shown that the broad pattern of the relevant coefficients' relative magnitudes and statistical certainty across subsamples of the comparative postwar fiscal history of developed democracies suggest that there may well be enough leverage available in these data to shed light on these interactions. Indeed, the estimated parameters even showed some promise of lining up as the theory being developed would have argued.