The politics of public spending

This thesis contains three chapters. The first two chapters deal with the effects of mass media on public policy. The first chapter, Mass Media Competition, Political Competition, and Public Policy, develops a theoretical model for analyzing the effects of mass media on policy. It is found that the cost and revenue structure of profit maximizing newspapers and TV-stations are likely to bias news selection. In particular, mass media provide less news to small groups of voters and voters who are not found valuable to advertisers. This news bias introduces a bias in public policy. The paper also discusses the effects of radio's and TV's overtaking of newspapers as the main information source in elections, and of increasing concentration in the newspaper market. The model predicts that both these changes will raise spending on those public services used by poor and rural voters.;The second chapter, Radio's Impact on New Deal Spending, goes on to estimate the effects of mass media on government spending, using the model developed in the first chapter. It studies a major New Deal relief program implemented in the middle of the expansion period of the radio. The main empirical finding is that counties with many radio listeners received more relief funds. More funds were allocated to poor counties with high unemployment, but controlling for these and other variables, the effects of the radio are large and highly significant.;The third chapter, Demography, voting, and local public expenditures: theory and evidence from Swedish municipalities, analyzes a separate question: do the elderly use the political system to get benefits from Swedish municipal spending at the expense of the young, and vice versa, and if so, to what extent? To analyze this question a median voter model with altruism within families is used. The answer given by the empirical investigation is that these the effects of the intergenerational conflict on municipal spending are significant and sizeable.