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Past research investigating the relationship between politics of fiscal institutions & fiscal deficits has primarily focused on how different configurations of partisan control over the executive & legislative branches produce distinct policy outcomes. Such models rely on the strength of majoritarian parties in Congress & party affiliation of president, as reflected in the theory of divided party government. In this study, a simple, fluid unidimensional spatial framework based on the degree of ideological fragmentation among the President, Senate, & House is set forth to arrive at a richer understanding of fiscal policy. It is hypothesized that US fiscal deficits will rise as the degree of ideological fragmentation among these institutions increases because it is more difficult to reach compromise & reconcile conflicting preferences over fiscal policy. Using annual data from the post-war period from 1948-1995, strong consistent empirical support for this thesis exists across alternative empirical specifications that reflect different pivotal House & Senate members, institutional alignments, & measures of ideological fragmentation. These findings indicate that the degree of ideological policy divergence among political institutions, independent of divided partisan control of government, plays a notable role in explaining fiscal budget deficits in the US during the post-war period. 1 Table, 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 69 References. Adapted from the source document.

Past research on policy subsystems has not attempted to explain the manner in which policy preferences for customary subsystem participants are formed as part of a system. The purpose of this research is to narrow the gap between the theoretical conceptualization and empirical articulation of policy subsystems. This study examines the formation of policy preferences for standard subsystem participants in the area of commercial bank regulation for the 1949-89 period. The findings reveal that the formation of (regulatory) policy preferences for these main subsystem participants reflects strategic behaviour rather than retrospective behaviour. This suggests that institutional participants within the commercial banking regulatory subsystem strategically operate in a policy environment with an abundance of information. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)