Scholars have proposed many routes by which campaign finance laws may impact turnout. For instance, laws restricting campaign spending may decrease mobilization, resulting in lower turnout. Alternatively, such laws might increase the competitiveness of elections, resulting in higher turnout....

Most political bargaining in the U.S. system has two features which are constitutionally mandated: (1) only one actor can make a formal proposal, and (2) he or she can make an indefinite number of proposals. Existing work in economics and political science ignores at least one of these features....

Tools of direct democracy, such as the citizen initiative, are available at both the state and local levels in the United States, yet models of the process typically do not consider these institutions in tandem. In this article, I develop a model of local fiscal policy that incorporates the...

<DIV><DIV>Government spending has increased dramatically in the United States since World War II despite the many rules intended to rein in the insatiable appetite for tax revenue most politicians seem to share. Drawing on examples from the federal and state governments, <I>Rules and Restraint</I> explains in...</i></div></div>

The decline of political efficacy and trust in the United States is often linked to the rise of money in politics. Both the courts and reform advocates justify restrictions on campaign donations and spending as necessary for the improvement of links between the government and the governed. We...

Researchers often seek to understand the effects of state policies or institutions on individual behavior or other outcomes in sub-state-level observational units (e.g., election results in state legislative districts). However, standard estimation methods applied to such models do not properly...

A distributive politics model establishes that the presence of exogenously enforceable spending limits reduces spending and that the effect of executive veto authority is contingent on whether spending is capped and whether the chief executive is a liberal or conservative. Surprisingly, when...

TYPE="ORG" OID="af2" CNY="US">Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) of 1988, we find that teenagers living in non-intact families are on average less likely to graduate from high school and less likely to attend college. They also are more likely to use alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana and are more...

We explore the relationship between individual health status and three separate measures of state social capital using data from the Current Population Survey, the General Social Survey and Putnam (2000). We find that state social capital is significantly associated with health status, even...