Electoral Rules and Public Spending Composition: The Case of Italian Regions

Abstract

This study investigates the effects produced by the electoral system on expenditure composition by exploring the case of Italian regions over the period 1986–2009. Empirical analysis shows that the regional current transfers expenditure distributed to families and firms significantly decreases when the regional electoral system moves from being proportional to mixed. Particularly striking is the reduction in preelectoral years under the regional mixed regime. (JEL D72, H30, H72)

Administrative Cost of US Counties and Local Context Dependence

“…Researchers have empirically examined the impact of amalgamation (Blom-Hansen et al, 2014), privatization (or outsourcing) (Bel and Miralles, 2003), and inter-government cooperation (Bel and Warner, 2015;Blaka, 2017;Dijkgraaf and Gradus, 2013) on government cost-efficiency. Researchers have also examined the impact of many political factors, which include political ideology, political competition, political participation (Buch-Gomez and Cabaleiro-Casal, 2020;Narbon-Perpina et al, 2020), political accountability (Bruns and Himmler, 2011), political transparency (Guillamón and Cuadrado-Ballesteros, 2021), the form of municipal government (the mayor-council form, the mayor-manager form, and whether the mayor is elected) (Grossman et al, 1999), and the electoral system (Baraldi, 2008;Santolini, 2017). 4 Among the limited number of studies examining county government expenditures, Morgan and Kickham (1999) find that the change of government forms has no effect on the fiscal behavior of the US county governments, which contradicts the strong association documented by Benton (2003) and McDonald (2015).…”

Electoral Systems, Partisan Politics, and Income Redistribution: A Critical Quasi-Experiment

“…This raises further concerns as to the exact causal mechanism linking electoral systems and states’ tendencies for redistribution. Of course, existing single-country studies of subnational jurisdictions, such as Swiss cantons (Funk & Gathmann, 2013) or Italian regions (Santolini, 2017), yield more support for Iversen and Soskice’s (2006) proposition, even if their results still tend to be somewhat mixed. It seems highly uncertain, however, whether or not conclusions about within-country dynamics can be safely extended to the domain of cross-national comparisons, especially in the light of notions such as “varieties of capitalism,” (VoC), (Hall & Soskice, 2001), coined to account for substantial cross-country disparities.…”