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The majoritarian parliamentary electoral system of Canada has been in existence in the same form since the founding of the modern state in 1867. In this short paper I offer a defense of Majoritarianism when the alternative is some form of Proportional Representation. While the individual arguments I employ are well known, the train of reasoning here is, to my knowledge, unusual in the current Canadian context. These remarks were prepared as an opening statement for a debate on electoral reform at a Faculty of Public Affairs conference in honor of Carleton University's 75th anniversary, March 3, 2017. The debate arose because of the Prime Minister's announced intention to replace the current system with some other during the election campaign that led to his victory in 2015. The debate occurred several months after the release of a lengthy report on electoral reform by a special all-party committee of the House of Commons. A few weeks before the debate, the Prime Minister announced (independently of the debate, of course) that his government would no longer pursue electoral reform, perhaps because it looked like he would not be able to avoid a referendum, a process which is hard to control. In any event, and especially in the light of recent attempts to change the electoral system both at the federal level and in some provinces, I think it is important for people to understand why the existing electoral system is a sensible one that likely will continue to serve us reasonably well.

In this chapter I provide an overview of the political economy of taxation in democratic states by considering the three most important issues in the field: (1) the evolution of the power to tax in (what are now) the mature constitutional democracies; (2) the nature and determinants of modern tax structures; and (3) redistribution in pluralistic societies over various horizons and in the face of economic shocks. The discussion considers the ideas and models that have arisen as scholars have grappled with these related issues, and points to some of the outstanding problems that may be worth pursuing in future research.

We introduce ideas about how coercion in public finance can be formally defined, building on recent work in the literature. Our discussion illustrates the connection between selected aspects of this research and earlier seminal work on coercion by Wicksell, Lindahl, and Buchanan and Tullock. We also attempt to contribute modestly towards a fuller understanding of the nature of coercion in a public finance setting. We use a Lindahl solution as the counterfactual social state relative to which coercion inherent in any situation is to be judged in order to evaluate and compare the nature of coercion imposed by a social planner and in an electoral equilibrium.

This paper contributes to the understanding of empirically-oriented work on the size of government by integrating the analysis of three basic elements: (i) the 'demand' for government stemming in part from attempts to coercively redistribute, often analyzed in a median voter framework; (ii) the 'supply' of taxable activities emphasized in Leviathan and other models of taxation; and (iii) the distribution of 'political influence' when influence and economic interests are distinct. The role of the first two factors have been considered in recent empirical studies of government growth by Ferris and West (1996) and Kau and Rubin (2002). Estimates of the effect of unequal political influence on the size of government have been provided by Mueller and Stratmann (2003). We combine all three elements in a spatial voting framework of a sort that has not been well explored, and use the comparative static properties of the integrative model to shed light on the analytical and empirical literatures.

The paper draws attention to the interdependence of regulation and taxation. We analyze the nature of policy equilibrium, as well as the implications of three historically important political and economic shocks, for the joint use of the two policy instruments in a framework that embodies relationships common in the literature on political economy. Regulation is represented by barriers to entry created by the government for a favored industry. Among the results are the following: the introduction of new methods of communication in politics, such as television advertising, leads to increased taxation of the average voter, greater entry barriers in private markets and greater resource use for campaign advertising, with the elasticity of supply in the regulated industry playing a crucial role. Growth in the labor force participation of women, on the other hand, lowers business tax rates, while resulting in more regulation and higher contributions of political resources. The paper concludes with a consideration of the efficiency of policy equilibrium and the analytical problems that arise in evaluating efficiency in such a context.

We investigate the influence of public policy on interregional migration in Canada using new interprovincial migration data constructed from personal income tax files for the years 1974 to 1996. We consider the consequences for gross and net migration flows of regional variation in employment insurance, provincial social assistance, personal income taxes and public spending of different types, and we compare the effects of these policies to the impacts on migration of wages, employment prospects and moving costs. We also conduct a preliminary investigation of the migration consequences of certain extraordinary political events in Quebec and of the closing of the cod fishery in Newfoundland. Unemployment insurance is an especially important and well documented source of income for many people, and regional variation in the generosity of the insurance system over the last three decades has been substantial. The results suggest that while increasing the generosity of the system in high unemployment regions may have induced more migration to the Atlantic region than would otherwise have occurred, the resulting changes in gross flows are probably not large and have had, at most, small effects on average provincial unemployment rates. A variety of other interesting results is also provided.

There has been surprisingly little empirical work explaining why countries choose different bundles of taxes. Early research by Musgrave and Hinrichs focused on the amorphous distinction between direct and indirect taxes. More recent research has examined the use of trade taxes and inflation, with little appreciation for the fact that countries are choosing a complete revenue mix. We examine the determinants of tax composition in 100 countries using data averaged over the periods 1975-80, 1981-85, and 1986-92. The dependent variables are tax revenues from the different sources as fractions of total revenue (or of GDP), including personal income taxes, corporate taxes, social security & payroll taxes, domestic goods & services taxes, trade taxes and tax rates, property taxes, and nontax revenues from seigniorage and public enterprises. All tax sources have increasing marginal political costs attached to their use. Consequently, as the scale or size of total revenues increases, reliance on all revenue sources can be expected to increase, though some tax bases may be used more heavily than others. We find strong evidence supporting this scale effect. Our empirical analysis also provides strong support for the prediction that countries tend to rely more heavily on tax sources for which the base is relatively large, and there is evidence that the use of taxes that depend on widespread literacy increases as educational attainment rises. While an explanation of the tax mix that relies on economic variables measuring scale, tax bases, and administration and enforcement costs works reasonably well even in a diverse sample of countries, we find that tax composition also varies with the nature of the political regime. Socialist countries tend to make more use of corporate, sales, and excise tax sources than other regimes, perhaps due to the greater ease with which the activity of businesses can be monitored, a stronger ideological interest in taxing business, or a reduced need to use taxation of individuals to accomplish social goals. We also find that more repressive governments rely less on personal income taxation, possibly because this tax source requires a higher degree of voluntary compliance than other forms of taxation. At

This paper asks whether political competition has played a role in moderating the governance issues that arise in relation to Canada's fiscal structure. By fiscal structure we mean three distinct but interrelated fiscal dimensions of the state: financial stability, long run size and short run interventions into the private economy, particularly with respect to the business cycle. The distinctiveness of this paper is that it focuses on four different measures of the degree of political competition: the size of the seat majority of the governing party in the House; the distribution of the volatility adjusted winning margins of the governing party; the proportion of electorally marginal constituencies adjusted for asymmetry; and the Przeworski-Sprague measure of electoral competitiveness at the constituency level. The analysis accounts for the differing time series properties of the political and economic variables and the comingling of long and short term fiscal policies in the time series data while finding support for the hypotheses that greater political competition will enhance fiscal stability (maintain a non-accelerating debt to GDP ratio), that government size will converge from above on economic and structural fundamentals and that period deficits/surpluses will align better with the business cycle. The potential impact of greater political competition is analyzed by applying the deficit model to the period of fiscal instability that arose in the 198

In this paper Engel-Granger time series methodology is used to combine trending economic variables with stationary political factors to search for well-defined political influences on central government budgets in Canada over the entire post-Confederation time period from 1870 to 2000. To motivate such an inquiry we first investigate and find evidence of partisan political influence on Canada's macro aggregates. However, because politics can influence economic outcomes only if there is a transmission mechanism through actual public policy choices, our finding of cycles in real output growth begs the question of whether such cycles arise through fiscal policy. Our analysis of three main fiscal policy instruments - public non-interest expenditure, taxation and the deficit net of interest - gives little support to any current political theory of public budgets, but does support the hypothesis that the degree of political competition matters for policy choices in both the long and short run. This new channel for the influence of politics on economic policy has not previously been isolated empirically in Canada and poses new questions in trying to reconcile the previous mixed results with respect to the influence of politics on economic aggregates.

We consider alternative methods of measuring the competitiveness of a majoritarian electoral system in the context of an analysis of Indian State elections. Our analysis highlights a number of weaknesses in the construction and interpretation of commonly used measures such as the effective number of parties, the first versus second place vote margin and safe seats, while presenting these and their proposed alternatives for 14 major Indian states from 1952 to 2009. The alternative indexes we present are based in part on ideas that are longstanding in the literature but have not been fully adopted within the Indian context. These indexes incorporate vote volatility, allow for multi-party competition at the constituency level, and adjust for asymmetry among parties of safe seats in the legislature. We argue that these newly computed indexes capture distinct but related dimensions of electoral competition better than do the extant commonly used measures. The analysis of these indexes is then extended to consider the role of caste, class, regionalism and level of development to reveal interesting patterns of commonality and difference in electoral competition across the states.

We address the problem of how to investigate whether economics, or politics, or both, matter in the explanation of public policy. We first pose the problem in a particular context by uncovering a political business cycle (using Canadian data for 130 years) and by taking up the challenge to make this fact meaningful by finding a transmission mechanism through actual public choices. Since the cycle is in real growth and it is reasonable to suppose that public expenditure would be involved, we then focus on investigation of the role of (partisan and opportunistic) political factors, as opposed to economics, in the evolution of government size. We ask whether the data allow us to distinguish between the convergence and the nonconvergence hypotheses. Convergence means that political competition forces public spending to converge in the long run to a level dictated by endowments, tastes and technology. Nonconvergence is taken to mean that political factors other than the degree of political competition prevent convergence to that long run. The general idea here is that a political factor can clearly be said to play a role in the evolution of public choices if it can be shown to lead to departures from a dynamic path defined by economic fundamentals in a competitive political system. The res

We investigate the measurement of three distinct, but related dimensions of electoral competition in a majoritarian electoral system: contestability in the struggle for governing power; competition among candidates at the constituency level; and competition among existing parties at the level of the legislature. At each step, the analysis is made concrete by calculating our preferred indexes of these dimensions of competitiveness for 14 major Indian states from 1972 to 2009 (and from 1952 in some cases), while comparing them to others that have been widely used, though not always calculated for Indian states. We also use our preferred indexes to study the importance of the level of development for an understanding of how competition has evolved across the states. The paper concludes by posing questions about the measurement of competitiveness, in general and in the Indian case, that arise in the course of our investigation.

The effective number of political parties (ENP) in a first-past-the-post single member (SMP) electoral system is analyzed as a dynamic process whereby the tournament nature of the election contest induces excessive entry and sunk entry costs promote persistence even as Duverger-Demsetz type political competition works to winnow unsuccessful minor candidates and parties. The result is a fringe of ever changing marginal parties circulating in long run equilibrium. The factors hypothesized to affect the entry and exit of candidates and parties are analyzed first using an auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) model whose advantage is that it allows the separation of an evolving long run equilibrium from short run variations in response to transitory changes in conditioning variables and the process of converging back to the long run equilibrium. The possibility that the short run adjustment process is asymmetric either for parties or candidates is tested using panel estimation techniques. The results are consistent with an observed time path that incorporates slower adjustment to positive as opposed to negative shocks. Variations in the size and trend of both the long and short run are then examined for ENP's ability to predict changes in the competitiveness of the Canadian federal electoral system.

Governments provide private goods as well as public services. We present a model of the private good - public good mix in public expenditure, and then apply it to explain the composition of spending by Indian state governments. The model explains why the publically provided private good to public good ratio is a decreasing function of the real income of voters, and is also decreasing in the degree of political competition. These hypotheses are tested on a panel of 14 Indian states for fiscal years 1987/88 to 2011/12. The long run results of three alternative ARDL models are broadly consistent with the proposed hypotheses, particularly the relationship between the private good share of state expenditures and real per capita incomes. They suggest that rising incomes and more effective political competit