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T his article examines whether and how institutional transparency and the polarization of political parties affect the scope for electoral cycles in fiscal policy. We show how access to information about fiscal policy matters for the existence of electoral cycles in public finances. Conditioning on the degree of fiscal policy transparency, we find that cycles are present in a sample of 19 advanced industrialized OECD economies, all fully developed and by no means recent democracies. We also find, consistent with the same theory, that electoral cycles are larger in more politically polarized countries. We thus provide evidence that electoral cycles in fiscal policy are not a phenomenon confined to or driven by weaker and newer democracies.Interest in the political business cycle, deliberate manipulation of economic policy instruments or outcomes in the vicinity of elections, is persistent. Originating with work on electoral cycles in unemployment and real income in the 1970s, many economists and political scientists investigated theoretical foundations for and empirical implications of the political business cycle. Evidence was mixed, and conclusions differed. Alesina, Roubini, and Cohen (1997) found post-election cycles in many James E. Alt is Frank G. Thomson professor of government, Harvard University,

O ptimal jurisdiction size is a cornerstone of government design. A strong tradition in political thought argues that democracy thrives in smaller jurisdictions, but existing studies of the effects of jurisdiction size, mostly cross-sectional in nature, yield ambiguous results due to sorting effects and problems of endogeneity. We focus on internal political efficacy, a psychological condition that many see as necessary for high-quality participatory democracy. We identify a quasiexperiment, a large-scale municipal reform in Denmark, which allows us to estimate a causal effect of jurisdiction size on internal political efficacy. The reform, affecting some municipalities, but not all, was implemented by the central government, and resulted in exogenous, and substantial, changes in municipal population size. Based on survey data collected before and after the reform, we find, using various difference-in-difference and matching estimators, that jurisdiction size has a causal and sizeable detrimental effect on citizens' internal political efficacy.

We explore the effect of the transparency of fiscal institutions in government on the scale of government and gubernatorial approval using a formal model of accountability. We construct an index of fiscal transparency for the American states from detailed budgetary information. With cross-sectional data for 1986–95, we find that—on average and controlling for other factors—fiscal transparency increases both the scale of government and gubernatorial approval. Our results imply that more transparent fiscal institutions induce greater effort by politicians, to whom voters give higher job approval, on average. Voters also respond by entrusting greater resources to politicians where fiscal institutions are more transparent, leading to larger government.

We describe the multi-layer temporal network which connects a population of more than 700 university students over a period of four weeks. The dataset was collected via smartphones as part of the Copenhagen Networks Study. We include the network of physical proximity among the participants (estimated via Bluetooth signal strength), the network of phone calls (start time, duration, no content), the network of text messages (time of message, no content), and information about Facebook friendships. Thus, we provide multiple types of communication networks expressed in a single, large population with high temporal resolution, and over a period of multiple weeks, a fact which makes the dataset shared here unique. We expect that reuse of this dataset will allow researchers to make progress on the analysis and modeling of human social networks.