The politics of bad ideas -- The tax cut theories -- Evaluating the claims -- Budgetary politics and the spending mind-set -- Institutions, rules, and politics -- Big government republicanism costs money -- Politics, economics, and tax theories -- The impacts of recent fiscal policies on America...

We employ bootstrap methods (Efron (1979)) to test the effect of an important electoral reform implemented in Italy from 1993 to 2001, that moved the system for electing the Par-liament from purely proportional to plurality rule (for 75% of the seats). We do not find any effect on either the...