Politics and fiscal policy in the American states

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the relationship between electoral politics and fiscal policies in the American states. The dissertation asks two questions about this relationship: First, are state fiscal policies electorally consequential for governors and state legislative parties? Second, do parties matter, that is, do they implement divergent fiscal policy levels? The theoretical expectations motivating this work can be briefly summarized as follows: Election outcomes are influenced by the fiscal policy choices elected officials make, because these choices are directly consequential for voters, who therefore use the election as an opportunity to send the policymakers a message concerning whether current policy reflects their preferences.;The method utilized in this analysis is ordinary least squares with dummy variables (OLS-DV), applied to a cross-sectional time-series of data for the fifty states and the period from 1950 to 1988.;The evidence confirms the expectation that state election outcomes are significantly influenced by fiscal policies. The focus of fiscal policy voting, however, is the lower house of the state's legislature, and to a lesser extent, the governorship. Upper house elections show no trace of fiscal policy voting. There is also evidence that electorates engage in both spatial (Downsian) and referendum voting. The configuration of party control (accounting for separation of powers) is a significant determinant of tax effort, the size of government, the redistributiveness of the fiscal system and revenue progressivity. Each of these aspects of fiscal policy diverge across the parties. Total expenditures, by contrast, are convergent; no partisan differences in expenditure levels are evident.