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"Fiscal Politics" published on by Oxford University Press.

We provide and test a theory explaining how and why racial attitudes shape public opinion on government spending in the United States. We hypothesize that many people think the government allocates money unfairly across racial groups, and "inequity aversion" leads them to reject spending as a result. Using data from an original survey, we find support for our theory in the sample as a whole, and within racial, partisan, and ideological subgroups. Indeed, unfairness views are comparable to partisanship in their relationship to opinion on spending. While prior work has shown that whites' racial attitudes are correlated with opinion on specific government programs, we show they shape opinion about the appropriate level of government spending writ large. We also move beyond the study of white opinion, measuring views of unfairness in the distribution of spending among racial minorities as well.

In recent years, a number of subliteratures on fiscal politics have converged toward a core set of hypothesized explanatory variables—representing political, economic, and social conditions—and a common modeling strategy patterned after that of Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky (1974). But rather than indicating an emerging consensus among the subliteratures about the nature of the budgetary process, the convergence masks substantial divergence over critical assumptions about the nature of decision making. In this article we describe the development of this divergence in assumptions in an effort to evaluate its impact on empirical modeling exercises. We conclude with some prescriptions for defining the research agenda for the budgeting literature through the 1990s.

Latin American fiscal policy presents a stark challenge to standard analytical models of political economy. Most importantly, since about 1990 the combination of drastic inequality, electoral democracy, and weak redistributive efforts appears to contradict the economists' workhorse, the median-voter model, which predicts significant fiscal redistribution under these conditions (Meltzer and Richard, 1981; Profeta and Scabrosetti, 2008: 70–71; Huber and Stephens, 2012). However, recent innovations – a "basic universalism" in social welfare and a couple of progressive tax reforms – might be thought to bring the region more in line with the model's predictions, or perhaps those of other approaches. In short, this field could benefit from theoretical clarification. This paper evaluates the performance of median-voter and several other models in an attempt to explain longstanding differences in fiscal policy. It compares Latin America with other world regions, first and mainly, before examining variation across the region. It then turns its attention to the new developments in policy.

The economic effects of the financial crisis in the eurozone have been much studied, but the impact of political and institutional changes made amidst crisis conditions have been less studied. This article examines the changes in the EU since 2008 through the lens of T.H. Marshall's concept of citizenship, gauging the effects of different changes in the EU polity on the citizenship rights of individuals. The key changes are in fiscal governance, which includes a new treaty as well as substantial legislation changing the balance of powers within and competencies of the EU institutions, the European Central Bank's role and the Troika arrangements for countries in crisis. We find that while the EU's contribution to civil citizenship in Europe is relatively intact, the development of its fiscal governance is bringing serious negative consequences for political and social citizenship in all member states. The EU is adopting policies that entrust more power to less democratically accountable institutions with the objective of fiscal rigour rather than social citizenship.

AbstractThe object of this paper is to indicate how public choice theory and orthodox normative tax theory may be integrated within a single coherent intellectual framework. Because public choice theory has quite different conceptual foundations from normative tax theory, this is no simple task. A purely positive fiscal theory, that derives tax arrangements as one aspect of the emergent political equilibrium, would leave no logical room for normative tax theory at all: the question as to what the tax system 'ought to be' becomes irrelevant, or at least inseparable from the broader question as to the appropriateness of general political institutions. However, if tax arrangements are viewed as part of the political institutional framework, normative tax theory can be admitted ‐ but in a somewhat reformulated way. The paper aims to set out briefly the reformulations required.

Whereas many studies have catalogued the factors which contribute to the furtherance of conflicts over the distribution of costs and benefits within asymmetrical integrative systems, few attempts have been made to determine the kinds of bargaining behavior which are most conducive to producing decisional outputs with positive feedback for the integrative system or to analyze the conditions under which this type of bargaining behavior can emerge. This study is addressed to precisely these two points. The analysis starts from the assumption that flexible bargaining strategies are most conducive to producing compromise within any given bargaining situation. Through the analysis pursued in this paper it is thus possible to demonstrate the very strong likelihood that the flexibility of bargaining strategies tends to vary directly with the degree of dependence and the range of alternative options open to any given country.