The critical election of 1932 represented a turning point in the future electoral successes of the Democrats and Republicans for over three decades. This paper seeks to measure the importance of the New Deal in facilitating the Democrats' control of the federal government well into the 1960s. We...

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience offer systematic evidence that fictional works exert a surprisingly strong influence on readers and have the power to shape their opinions and worldviews. Building on these findings, we study ‘Potterian economics’, the economic ideas, insights...

The Democratic Party's electoral success during the 1930s has long intrigued politicians and scholars. To gain new insight into that success, this paper examines the striking heterogeneity in county-level support for Roosevelt. Even though the Depression's effects and the New Deal's benefits...

Women's suffrage led to one of the greatest enfranchisements in history. Voting rights, however, were not won by force or threats thereof, a fact leading political economy theories find hard to explain. Studying the timing of suffrage extensions in US states between 1869 and 1919, we find that a...

The issue of public investments became a very challenging subject for public decision makers since it incorporates the question of state performance, the quality of public finance and their effects on growth.The quality of public finance (QPF) is a multidimensional concept. It may be regarded as...

In Nigeria, the government activities vis-à-vis public expenditure has grown rapidly both in absolute, relative and as a share of GDP over the years. These growths in government expenditure have been due to certain factors which are believed to have significant effect on the fiscal operation of...

This research examines regional government performance in Indonesia's provinces after the implementation of fiscal decentralization in 2001 using a two-stage approach. First, extensive input and output data are utilized to measure government productivity and efficiency indices using a Malmquist...

We analyze electorally motivated public spending using disaggregated expenditure data. Election cycles in total expenditures and in specific sub-categories mainly exist in newly democratized Eastern European countries. However, electorally motivated spending policies are ineffective means to...

We consider a two period model in which an incumbent political party chooses the level of a current policy variable unilaterally, but faces competition from a political opponent in the future. Both parties care about voters' payoffs, but they have different beliefs about how policy choices will...

This paper explores the dynamics of nation-building policies and the conditions under which a state can promote a shared national identity on its territory. A forward-looking central government that internalizes identity dynamics shapes them by choosing the level of state centralization....