اقتصاد سیاسی از نظر اندازه دولت

We contribute to the political economy of public-sector growth by integrating three essential elements (i) the ‘demand’ for government stemming from attempts to coercively redistribute, as well as from demand for public services, 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 welfare are distinct. We combine these elements in a spatial voting framework, and use the comparative static properties of the model to shed light on empirical results in the literature.

A systematic account of the size of government in democratic countries includes at least three elements. First, ‘demand’ for government stems from attempts to use the fiscal system to coercively redistribute, as well as from the usual demand for public services. Second, it is necessary to investigate the role of the ‘supply’ of activities on which taxation may be levied. A third key aspect is the distribution and role of political influence, as distinct from the economic welfare of individual voters. The first two of these elements have been combined in empirical studies of the growth of government, e.g., by Ferris and West (1996) and Kau and Rubin (1981, 2002). Estimates of the effect of unequal political influence have been made by Mueller and Stratmann (2003), using a framework that also pays some attention to demand and supply.1 In this paper, we combine all three elements in a spatial probabilistic voting model. We provide a closed form solution for government size and use the comparative-static properties of the model to shed light on analytical, and especially, empirical results in the literature. A comparison of the size of government in the integrative model with less realistic median voter and Leviathan frameworks helps to outline the contribution of the broader view that we develop.

The size of government and the structure of taxation jointly depend on the traditional demand for publicly provided goods, coercion exercised under majority rule, the supply of taxable activities and the distribution of political influence, as well as the on the nature of legislative and other institutions. In this paper, we set issues of governance aside and combine ‘demand,’ ‘supply’ and ‘political influence’ in a spatial voting framework of the size of government and the structure of taxation. We draw out some of the implications of this integrative model for the interpretation of extant analytical and empirical results. In contrast to the median voter model in the Meltzer and Richard, 1981 and Meltzer and Richard, 1983 tradition, which is now fading from use due to the limitations of its unidimensional issue space, all three moments (mean, variance and skewness) of the distribution of income matter in the integrative spatial voting model we explore. In particular, the variance affects the relative size of the public sector because of a relationship between this second moment, the structure of taxation and total tax revenue. In comparison to probabilistic models of fiscal systems, such as that of Hettich and Winer (1999, 1988), the present study extends this mode of inquiry to explicitly deal with coercive redistribution, showing how the covariance of income and political influence arises as a factor determining the size of the fiscal system. Even in the simple framework we have constructed, where several assumptions are made to permit the derivation of closed form solutions, the size of government is a complex phenomenon. In the integrative model, the relative size of the public sector depends on preferences for leisure and public goods and productivity in home production, as well as on the moments of the distribution of income. The role of the covariance of influence and income, which cannot arise in a median voter world, is especially interesting. We know little about the empirical importance of this factor.