Jonathan Rodden

• Stanford University

We analyze the relationship between accountability and polarization in the context of the COVID crisis. We make three points. First, when voters perceive the out-party to be ideologically extreme, they are less likely to hold incumbents accountable for poor outcomes via competence-based evaluations. Knowing this, even in the context of major crises...

Who registers to vote? Although extensive research has examined the question of who votes, our understanding of the determinants of political participation will be limited until we know who is missing from the voter register. Studying voter registration in lower-income settings is particularly challenging due to data constraints. We link the offici...

We introduce a fine-grained measure of the extent to which electoral districts combine and split local communities of co-partisans in unnatural ways. Our indicator—which we term Partisan Dislocation —is a measure of the difference between the partisan composition of a voter’s geographic nearest neighbors and that of her assigned district. We show t...

Do social networks matter for the adoption of new forms of political participation? We develop a formal model showing that the quality of communication that takes place in social networks is central to understanding whether a community will adopt forms of political participation where benefits are uncertain and where there are positive externalitie...

Using new data on roll-call voting of US state legislators and public opinion in their districts, we explain how ideological polarization of voters within districts can lead to legislative polarization. In so-called “moderate” districts that switch hands between parties, legislative behavior is shaped by the fact that voters are often quite heterog...

Building on the unfinished research program of Gudgin and Taylor (1979), we analytically derive the linkage between a party’s territorial distribution of support and the basic features of its vote‐seat curve. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the corresponding empirical model with an analysis of elections in post‐war Great Britain, focusing in...

While conventional wisdom holds that partisan bias in US legislative elections results from intentional partisan and racial gerrymandering, we demonstrate that substantial bias can also emerge from patterns of human geography. We show that in many states, Democrats are inefficiently concentrated in large cities and smaller industrial agglomerations...

Due to insufficient sample sizes in national surveys, strikingly little is known about public opinion at the level of Congressional and state legislative districts in the United States. As a result, there has been virtually no study of whether legislators accurately represent the will of their constituents on individual issues. This article solves...

Brazil is the most decentralized country in the developing world. It has a long history of federalism and decentralization, and has become considerably more decentralized over the last two decades. By 1995, state and local governments together accounted for nearly 60 percent of public consumption (Ter-Minassian, 1997: 438). In comparison with other...

Many of the world's most populous democracies are political unions composed of states or provinces that are unequally represented in the national legislature. Scattered empirical studies, most of them focusing on the United States, have discovered that overrepresented states appear to receive larger shares of the national budget. Although this rela...

In order to address classic questions about democratic representation in countries with winner-take-all electoral districts, it is necessary to understand the distribution of political preferences across districts. Recent formal theory literature has contributed new insights into how parties choose platforms in countries with a continuum of heterog...

Although fiscal policies of central governments sometimes provide modest insurance against regional income shocks, this paper shows that procyclical fiscal policy among provincial governments can easily overwhelm these stabilizing effects. We examine the cyclicality of budget items among provincial governments in seven federations, showing that own...

Due to insufficient sample sizes in national surveys, strikingly little is known about issue preferences at the level of Congressional districts in the United States, and existing studies focus only on a single issue dimension. This paper takes a first step toward filling this gap by developing a hierarchical Bayesian model to combine survey and ce...

Why do some federations implement highly progressive intergovernmental transfer schemes while others do not? First, this essay establishes some stylized facts, using provincial-level data from nine federations to measure the extent of inter-regional redistribution achieved through intergovernmental transfers in each country. Second, it explores sou...

This paper analyses, in a simple two-region model, the undertaking of noxious facilities when the central government has limited prerogatives. The central government decides whether to construct a noxious facility in one of the regions, and how to …nance it. We study this problem under both full and asymmetric information on the damage caused by th...

When one of the major parties in the United States wins a substantially larger share of the seats than its vote share would seem to warrant, the conventional explanation lies in manipulation of maps by the party that controls the redistricting process. Yet this paper uses a unique data set from Florida to demonstrate a common mechanism through whic...

This paper examines the relationship between territorial representation and fiscal redistribution in the European Union. Given that small states are over-represented in both the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers, simple models of legisla-tive vote-buying predict that over-represented member states will be favored in the distribution...

A median voter model is developed to explain the size of the vertical fiscal gap in a federation, i.e. the extent to which subnational governments' expenditures exceed their own-source tax revenues. In our model, individuals vote in subnational elections and in federal elections to determine tax rates and spending on public services by each level o...

A venerable supposition of American survey research is that the vast majority of voters have incoherent and unstable preferences about political issues, which in turn have little impact on vote choice. We demonstrate that these findings are manifestations of measurement error associated with individual survey items. First, we show that averaging a...

This article asks whether religion undermines the negative relationship between income and left voting that is assumed in standard political economy models of democracy. Analysis of cross-country survey data reveals that this correlation disappears among religious individuals in countries that use proportional representation. This is the case in la...

America, we are told, is a nation divided. The cartographers who draw up the maps of U.S. election results have branded a new division in American politics: Republican red versus Democratic blue. What is the source of this division? Most observers point not to the bread-and-butter economic issues of the New Deal alignment but to a "culture war." In...

Based on dynamic game of incomplete information, this paper argues that subnational governments with bailout expectations face incentives to avoid or delay adjustment, and as a result accumulate greater debt than governments without such expectations. The problem of empirically identifying bailout expectations is assuaged by the unique German syste...

Este artigo revê e redireciona a literatura empírica comparada sobre as causas e conseqüências da descentralização e do federalismo. A "primeira geração" de estudos concebia a descentralização como um jogo de soma zero, de transferência de autoridade do centro para os governos subnacionais; partia das premissas da economia de bem-estar social e da...

This article reviews and redirects the cross-country empirical literature on the causes and consequences of decentralization and federalism. A "first generation" of studies viewed decentralization as a simple zero-sum transfer of authority from the center to subnational governments, drew upon the assumptions of welfare economics and public choice t...

This article discusses and tests different hypotheses about electoral and legislative strategies in Brazil, which is a federation with a strong president, over-representation in both chambers, and members of the legislative branch who are encouraged to seek funds for their constituencies. It examines the geographical distribution of budget and extr...

This article discusses and tests different hypotheses about electoral and legislative strategies in Brazil, which is a federation with a strong president, over-representation in both chambers, and members of the legislative branch who are encouraged to seek funds for their constituencies. It examines the geographical distribution of budget and extr...

this paper was presented at CEBRAP, So Paulo in November 2001 and at Duke University in November 2002. The authors wish to thank seminar participants, Argelina Figueiredo, Fernando Limongi, Eduardo Marques, David Samuels, and Richard Locke for helpful discussions and comments, and MIT for financial support

This article revisits the influential Leviathan hypothesis, which posits that tax competition limits the growth of government spending in decentralized countries. I use panel data to examine the effect of fiscal decentralization over time within countries, attempting to distinguish between decentralization that is funded by intergovernmental transf...

This paper uses cross-national data to examine the effects of fiscal and political institutions on the fiscal performance of subnational governments. Long-term balanced budgets among subnational governments are found when either (1) the center imposes borrowing restrictions or (2) subnational governments have both wide-ranging taxing and borrowing...

Recent research on federalism is extremely divided. While some tout the benefits of "market-preserving" federalism, others point to the fragmentation and incoherence of policy in federal states. This research bridges the divide by analyzing the political and fiscal structures that are likely to account for the highly divergent economic experiences...

The European Union should provide an especially useful case for comparative analysis. Small states are rather severely over-represented in both legislative chambers, and allegiances to federation-wide political parties that might cut against pure regional self-seeking are absent. Moreover, although not as dramatic as in the United States, frequent...

Federal constitutions are viewed as incomplete contracts that must be renegotiated among self-interested, reelection-seeking politicians. Even when collectively sub-optimal, they are difficult to renegotiate if each state government faces electoral incentives to ignore externalities and federation-wide collective goods. Vertically integrated politi...

This paper explores the political economy of fiscal policy in the German Länder, testing several theories from the cross-national literature on budget deficits along with some additional hypotheses relating to the incentives created by the German federal system. The results suggest that governments controlled by the left spend and borrow more in th...

This paper assesses the common perception that decentralization has been driven by the rapid pace of international economic integration in the 1980s and 1990s.

Empirical studies have determined that tax-transfer programs pursued by central governments in decentralized federations provide modest insurance against asymmetric regional income shocks, but this paper hypothesizes that pro-cyclical fiscal policy among provincial governments can easily overwhelm any such stabilizing effect. I examine the cyclical...

A demand based theory of sub-national debt bailouts in the pres-ence of federal revenue sharing is presented. While revenue sharing has ambiguous effects on sub-national borrowing, it alters the demand for the provision of bailouts among politicians with local constituen-cies as a bailout implies a shift of taxation towards the federal tier. To the...

I analyze the relationship between political institutions and sovereign borrowing in a simple model where institutions are endogenous and governments vary in their credit risk and politi-cal goals. The model demonstrates that there is an inverse relationship between institutional constraints and the cost of borrowing, which is consistent with the N...

Abstract will be provided by author.

The international integration of markets and the decentralization of authority within nation states are two defining trends of the contemporary era. A popular speculation is that globalization has caused a downward shift in the locus of governance by reducing the economic costs of smallness and allowing localities and regions with distinctive prefe...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

Within the rich literature on distributive politics, models of vote buying treat the distributive logic of different particularistic incentives as theoretically similar. This article relaxes that assumption, focusing on how the nature of a good affects the political logic of its distribution, and then uses data from a new compilation of land transf...

The distribution of votes in presidential elections suggests that Democrats should be at a severe disadvantage in elections to the U.S. House of Representatives because of an inefficient geographic support distribution, yet they have controlled the chamber for 75 percent of the post-war sessions, largely because they are able to win and retain seat...

Why are some countries democratic and others not? How do political institutions affect economic development and political conflict? How do politics in the United States compare to politics in other countries? This class first reviews cultural, social, and institutional explanations for political outcomes. It then turns to more detailed examination...