This Article articulates and analyzes the possibility of what we call the unbundled executive. The unbundled executive is a plural executive regime in which discrete authority is taken from the President and given exclusively to a directly elected executive official. Imagine a directly elected...

Beginning with California's Serrano v. Priest in 1971, the constitutionality of school finance systems in U.S. states has been under attack for nearly 35 years. During this time, 37 states have had the their education funding systems challenged on constitutional grounds. In 25 of these states,...

There are more than 500,000 elected officials in the United States, 96 percent of whom serve in local governments. Electoral density—the number of elected officials per capita or per governmental unit—varies greatly from place to place. The most electorally dense county has more than 20...

Much of the literature on women in politics seeks to answer two questions: Why are there so few women in elective office? What do women in elective office do differently from men? We connect these two strands of the literature by showing that the process by which women are selected into office...

For too long, research on retrospective voting has fixated on how economic trends affect incumbents' electoral prospects in national and state elections. Hundreds of thousands of elections in the United States occur at the local level and have little to do with unemployment or inflation rates....

This paper discusses the common-pool problems that arise when multiple territorially overlapping governments share the authority to provide services and levy taxes in a common geographic area. Contrary to the traditional Tiebout model in which increasing the number of competing governments...

Two major problems exist in applying ideal point estimation techniques to state legislatures. First, there has been a scarcity of available longitudinal roll call data. Second, even where such data exists, scaling ideal points within a single state suffers from a basic defect. No comparisons can...

One of the most remarkable yet least remarked upon accomplishments in American public education in the twentieth century is the success of the school consolidation movement. Between 1930 and 1970, 9 out of every 10 school districts were eliminated through consolidation. Nearly two-thirds of...