Chapter 22 The Political Economy of Law

McNollgast,

doi:10.1016/s1574-0730(07)02022-1

Cited by 18 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 136 publications

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“…Political scientists, of course, have always studied policy formation in general and legislative institutions in particular (see recent reviews in McNollgast 2007 andde Figuerido andStiglitz 2017). In several recent publications, political scientists studying China have begun to engage with questions about the incentives for and determinants of legislation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Do Chinese Subnational Governments Make Law?

Cui

2019

SSRN Journal

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How often does law get made in China, and what kinds of law? We construct a dataset on subnational lawmaking to address these questions. The dataset builds on a basic insight: Chinese politicians choose among three types of instruments to implement policy-statutes, regulations, and informal policy directives (IPDs). IPDs are easier to promulgate than statutes and regulations, and the fact that they lack the force of law rarely impedes enforcement. Why then do politicians make law at all? Several findings shed light on this puzzle. First, the choice between formal lawmaking and IPDs depends on the policy subject. Second, provinces and cities have distinct policy specializations. Specialization may lead one level of government to invest in lawmaking in the subject, or lead the other level of government to refrain from doing so. Third, politician tenure has little impact on lawmaking. Fourth, while population is a relevant predictor of lawmaking, other factors that might seem to represent the "demand for law" bear unexpected correlations with the quantity of law.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Do Chinese Subnational Governments Make Law?

Cui

2019

SSRN Journal

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“…However, if distributional impacts do stick, then not only efficiency but also distribution matters for welfare analysis, since social welfare is traditionally understood to encompass both efficiency and distribution. Distributional impacts could stick, for example, by improving the bargaining position of legislative factions seeking more redistribution (see McNollgast [2007] for a review of models of interactions between courts and legislatures, such as Eskridge [1991] in the context of statutory interpretation). That is, if school finance court decisions durably increase the resources of the poor, and one's welfare function places a different value on a dollar in the hands of a poor person than a rich person, then distribution matters for welfare too.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The results also suggest that normative analysis of legal rules, either when assessing the welfare consequences of actual or potential rule changes, might want to consider more complex models of political economy (Eskridge & Ferejohn 1992;McNollgast 2007;Liscow 2017a), which could provide guidance on when distributive consequences of court rulings are likely to "stick" and therefore matter for welfare analysis. At least in this case, welfare analysis of changes in legal rules should include distributional impacts, since those impacts stick.…”

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confidence: 98%

Are Court Orders Sticky? Evidence on Distributional Impacts from School Finance Litigation

Liscow¹

2018

J Empirical Legal Studies

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Whether welfare analysis of legal rule changes should evaluate distributional outcomes as well as efficiency depends crucially on how much their distributional impacts stick. That is, do court mandates ultimately affect the distribution of taxes and spending or do legislatures offset the distributional consequences of those court orders with other changes? Little is known about this question. To offer insight into it, I use an event study methodology to show how state revenues and expenditures respond to court orders to increase funding for schools. I find that the court orders' distributional impacts do stick. The education spending is financed by tax increases that do not target the largest beneficiaries of the increased education spending, the poor and those with children. Thus, since the main beneficiaries of the school spending do not pay a disproportionate share of the costs, advocates for school finance reform are effective at transferring resources to poor families. The results suggest that welfare analysis of these legal rules should take into account not only efficiency but also distribution, in a departure from traditional economic analysis of legal rules.

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“…Ellickson (1991) sets out the conventional dividing line between social norms and law: law is the subset of norms that are created and enforced by governments. Positive political theory takes the idea that law is the province of government for granted and focuses on the processes and principles by which the substance of law is determined (McNollgast 2007). Economic analysis of law focuses on the behavioral incentives created by public sanctions-fines, damages, imprisonment; the relational contracting literature, for example, distinguishes between formal contracting, meaning contracts enforced by the state, and informal contracting, meaning contracts enforced by reputation and repeat play (Hadfield and Bozovic 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Privatizing Law: Is Rule of Law an Equilibrium without Private Ordering?

Hadfield

Weingast

2017

SSRN Journal

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Almost all theorizing about law, including the rule of law, begins with government. Analysts from a wide variety of perspectives make this presumption. We contest this presumption. In this paper, we ask whether rule of law is an equilibrium in the absence of private ordering. To address this question, we rely on the what-is-law model of Hadfield and Weingast (2012). Most legal theory has asserted that legal attributes are characteristic of legal orders, such as generality, clarity and neutrality. In contrast, we show that they can be derived from a minimal normative premise about what constitutes law in a setting where all enforcement is decentralized and private. That premise is that anything we want to productively define as law must, at a minimum, have the capacity deliberately to adapt the content of the rules without disrupting equilibrium. We then consider whether a regime that has the capacity deliberately to adapt the content of rules but is not dependent on private enforcement must implement the rule of law in order to secure equilibrium. We argue that it does not. We end with some implications for building rule of law in the poor and developing countries around the world that lack productive legal order.

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Chapter 22 The Political Economy of Law

Cited by 18 publications

References 136 publications

When Do Chinese Subnational Governments Make Law?

When Do Chinese Subnational Governments Make Law?

Are Court Orders Sticky? Evidence on Distributional Impacts from School Finance Litigation

Privatizing Law: Is Rule of Law an Equilibrium without Private Ordering?

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