Suchergebnisse

This article examines how policy‐makers solve problems within local representative democracies. It will be argued that politicians cannot undertake an exhaustive search of all possible policy choices; instead, they might use an incremental strategy such as the hill‐climbing heuristic. These possibilities will be formalized using the median voter model as an analytical framework. The corresponding models will then be estimated over a set of French jurisdictions (the départements). The empirical results lend support to the hill‐climbing model, given that: (1) for social welfare and secondary school expenditures, the influence of the past is significant; (2) a pure model of incrementalism, without any exogenous variables, is not appropriate for explaining the behavior of departmental council members; and (3) the impact of the past is more significant and stronger when expenditure levels are higher.

This article makes an attempt to evaluate the impact of the French fiscal decentralization on total public expenditure level. We estimate the econometric model initiated by Oates [1972] on the 1960-2006 period, taking into account the various factors explaining government size (Wagner's law, weaker economic growth, etc.). Our estimations results highlight three phenomena: (1) expenditure decentralization is associated with a smaller public sector; (2) the 80's transfer of responsibilities attenuated the negative effect of expenditure decentralization; (3) tax revenue decentralization has a positive impact on government size. Adapted from the source document.

In this paper we propose an original model of competition for effective political power between majority and opposition coalitions. The model indicates that the electoral margin of the majority and the fragmentation of both coalitions are key variables that determine their effective political power. We estimate the model in the case of the French departements. Our econometric results support the model and show that the per capita social expenditures in the French departements depend on the effective political power of the majority. Adapted from the source document.