Do Term Limits Restrain State Fiscal Policy? Approaches for Causal Inference in Assessing the Effects of Legislative Institutions
Do Term Limits Restrain State Fiscal Policy? Approaches for Causal Inference in Assessing the Effects of Legislative Institutions
复制标题
任期限制是否会限制国家财政政策？
DOI：
10.1111/lsq.12016
复制
发表时间：
2013
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Colin H. McCubbins
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
L. Keele;Neil Malhotra;Colin H. McCubbins
研究国家政治的学者通常对立法机构对政策结果的因果效应感兴趣。例如，在20世纪90年代，一些州对州议员实行了任期限制。任期限制的倡导者认为，这项机构改革将在许多方面改变国家政策，包括限制国家支出。我们强调了一些研究设计问题，这些问题通过解决任期限制和支出问题，使评估机构对国家结果的影响的努力复杂化。特别是，我们关注(1)治疗效应的异质性和(2)非期限状态作为期限限制状态的良好反事实的适用性。我们比较了两种不同的识别策略来处理这些问题：差异性(DID)估计和以先前结果为条件的识别策略，重点是综合病例对照。使用更严格的因果推理方法，我们几乎没有发现任期限制影响国家支出的证据。我们的分析和结果对寻求评估国家级机构的因果效应的研究人员是有参考价值的。
Scholars of state politics are often interested in the causal effects of legislative institutions on policy outcomes. For example, during the 1990s a number of states adopted term limits for state legislators. Advocates of term limits argued that this institutional reform would alter state policy in a number of ways, including limiting state expenditures. We highlight a number of research design issues that complicate attempts to estimate the effect of institutions on state outcomes by addressing the question of term limits and spending. In particular, we focus on (1) treatment effect heterogeneity and (2) the suitability of nonterm-limit states as good counterfactuals for term-limit states. We compare two different identification strategies to deal with these issues: differences-in-differences (DID) estimation and conditioning on prior outcomes with an emphasis on synthetic case control. Using more rigorous methods of causal inference, we find little evidence that term limits affect state spending. Our analysis and results are informative for researchers seeking to assess the causal effects of state-level institutions.