Line-Item Veto: Where Is Thy Sting?

Carter, John R.; Schap, David

doi:10.1257/jep.4.2.103

Cited by 49 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Most studies have found little evidence for its importance in influencing total spending (e.g. Carter and Schap, 1990;Holtz-Eakin, 1988;Nice, 1988). See Masia (1995), though, for an argument that the composition of spending may be affected by this institution.…”

Section: Actors and Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stop Us Before We Spend Again: Institutional Constraints on Government Spending

Primo

2006

Economics & Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A distributive politics model establishes that the presence of exogenously enforceable spending limits reduces spending and that the effect of executive veto authority is contingent on whether spending is capped and whether the chief executive is a liberal or conservative. Surprisingly, when spending limits are in place, governments with conservative executives spend more than those with more liberal chief executives. Limits are welfare improving, as is the executive veto when it leads to the building of override coalitions. Using 32 years of US state budget data, this paper also establishes empirically that strict balanced budget rules constrain spending and also lead to less pronounced short-term responses to fluctuations in a state's economy. Party variables like divided government and party control of state legislatures tend to have little or no direct effect, with political institutions and economic indicators explaining much of the variation in state spending. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

show abstract

Section: Actors and Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stop Us Before We Spend Again: Institutional Constraints on Government Spending

Primo

2006

Economics & Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In many states, the governor possesses some version of line-item veto authority (Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1991). Carter and Schap (1990) argue that in many circumstances the effect of a line-item veto on aggregate spending is indeterminate, because the line-item veto alters the composition rather than the aggregate level of spending. That is, the reduction in expenditure on one line item may be more or less than offset by changes in expenditure on another line item.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Dynamic Model of State Budget Outcomes under Divided Partisan Government

Alt

Lowry

2000

The Journal of Politics

168

119

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper describes a model of partisan fiscal adjustment where policy is made in a bicameral legislature subject to a veto by an independent executive. We show how changes in fiscal policy depend not just on the configuration of parties, but also on veto institutions and on which party or parties was responsible for the previous budget. In our model, the legislative party is unable to shift fiscal policy all the way to its preferred point in one step, but can take advantage of repeated shocks to shift fiscal policy toward its preferred target slowly, probably over several budget cycles. We describe how legislatures can use shocks to shift expenditures and revenues and how this means that over time one can observe persistence of past partisan targets or slower and faster shifts toward new targets. We show also how the amount of change in policy should vary according to how control is configured and how patterns of control interact with institutions.Empirical sections of this paper lay out a specification for estimating a model which is capable of incorporating these features, and report estimates based on taxes and spending in 35 nonsouthern states from . While the results are neither strong nor robust, estimated speeds of adjustment to targets line up as expected, with unified governments showing faster adjustment than divided, and the party targets go in the right direction, with Democrats apparently targeting a larger share of state incomes for the public budget than Republicans. Interestingly, Republicans react much more strongly to budget surpluses by reducing revenues than do Democrats. 5RNKV DTCPEJThe 1995 budget crisis in Congress produced a situation in which no formal budget passed and the government operated under a series of continuing resolutions which carried over the provisions of the previous year's budget. The result, long periods of uncertainty and conflict, focused attention on the political problem of fiscal adjustment in a bicameral system when parties are polarized in terms of having different partisan targets for the scale of taxes and public spending.In this paper we describe a model of partisan fiscal adjustment where policy is made in a bicameral legislature subject to a veto by an independent executive. We focus particularly on "split branch" government, where the legislature and the executive are controlled by different parties. We show how changes in fiscal policy depend not just on the configuration of parties, but also on veto institutions and on which party or parties was responsible for the previous budget. In our model, the legislative party is unable to shift fiscal policy all the way to its preferred point in one step. However, it is able to take advantage of repeated shocks to shift fiscal policy toward its preferences slowly, probably over several budget cycles.Our basic model and a few extensions show that budgets made under divided government can depend on a lot of features that we often think of as procedural details, like the identity of the "veto player," the l...

show abstract

“…Several multistate studies employing econometric models have analyzed the impact of the item veto, compared with the full executive veto, on the level and composition of state spending. In general, those studies found that in the long‐term state budgets are not altered by the item veto, and that the short‐term impact of the item veto depends upon the political party of the governor and the party composition of the legislature (Abrams and Dougan ; Alm and Evers ; Carter and Schap ; Dearden and Husted , ; Holtz‐Eakin ; Indridason ; Nice ).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Other Six: Governors Without The Line‐Item Veto

Lauth¹

2016

Public Budgeting & Finance

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines the absence of the line‐item veto in six state governments, Indiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It seeks to answer the following questions: Have there been proposals in recent years in those states to establish the line‐item veto? Why have those states not given line‐item veto authority to their governor? What is the likelihood in the foreseeable future of line‐item veto adoption in any of the states now without it? Based upon six case studies of budget institutions and processes, and legislative histories of line‐item veto proposals, answers to these questions are provided.

show abstract

Line-Item Veto: Where Is Thy Sting?

Cited by 49 publications

References 8 publications

Stop Us Before We Spend Again: Institutional Constraints on Government Spending

Stop Us Before We Spend Again: Institutional Constraints on Government Spending

A Dynamic Model of State Budget Outcomes under Divided Partisan Government

The Other Six: Governors Without The Line‐Item Veto

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About