| Geography profoundly shapes a wide variety of human behavior. The cost of moving from one place to another, of conveying information across space, and of neighbors' actions all alter social and economic outcomes; borders offer an unusual glimpse of the workings of these social processes across space. This glimpse is especially relevant for political science: borders are political creations and where different governments, laws, and elections come into proximity.; Not all borders have the same theoretical ramifications. Some borders, particularly those between countries, are tightly controlled and costly to cross. Others, particularly those within countries, are much more open. Traditionally, most border studies in political economy have assumed that borders fell towards the closed end of this permeability continuum, but open borders are becoming increasingly common. At the same time, a border's significance depends on the potential divergence between the two jurisdictions on either side: if the units are weak or have limited autonomy, there is less scope for border effects. But, though impermeability or weak jurisdictions may moderate the effects, the access that border locations afford to goods, information, and policy outcomes from other polities change residents' incentives and behavior.; This dissertation considers how these effects play out using data from small geographical aggregates in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Political engagement, notably electoral turnout, is markedly lower near borders, and borderland residents vote in referendums for predictably different policies than their compatriots elsewhere in the realms of tax, regulatory, and social policy. Borderland residents' exposure to other jurisdictions' political campaigns and varying attention from policymakers accord with these results. |
