The interpretation of the long-standing fiscal illusion hypothesis presented here is that the illusion is the result of attempts by utility maximizing public managers (politicians or bureaucrats) to direct the resources of the community toward themselves. In general, they will succeed if the...

A time series analysis indicates monetary growth and the Gallup Poll in Canada are systematically related at ‘electoral cycle’ periodicities (5 to 20 quarters) under flexible exchange rates, and demonstrates the absence of an electoral component in Canadian monetary growth under fixed rates....

We develop and test predictions about the factors determining the competitiveness of elections to the U.S. Senate. To do so, we deliberately abstract away from candidate-specific conditions that have often been used to study political competitiveness in order to focus on basic structural...

Ronald Wintrobe (1990, 1998) has recently provided a theoretical foundation for estimating equations that attempt to explain the dependence of civil liberties and political rights in non-democratic regimes on the history of economic growth. This theory suggests that data from different kinds of...