Collaborative Research: States, Rates and the Fates of Federations: Provincial Politics and Fiscal Policy Around the World

这项调查支持完成一个大型数据集，使对世界各地联邦的省级财政绩效进行比较分析成为可能。近年来，中央政府向省级政府下放了大量职能。与此同时，人们对联邦制重新产生了兴趣，认为联邦制是解决欧盟和南非等多种环境下的区域治理问题的工具。与此同时，俄罗斯、巴西和阿根廷的一些研究人员注意到一种共同的病态，即联邦政府鼓励省级政客过度捕捞公共收入，在国家救助的预期中超支，并在维持政治机器上花费资源。因此，联邦制的比较研究已经成为政治学、经济学和政策研究交叉领域的一个蓬勃发展的研究项目，因为研究人员试图回答有关政府财政决策背后的驱动力以及更广泛地说，多层次政府体系中问责制的本质的问题。知识价值：目前对比较联邦制的研究为提出的研究提供了三个理由。首先，虽然一些研究人员已经开始调查导致不同联邦之间经济结果差异的制度，但他们对联邦进行了整体研究。很少有人认识到，联邦内的各省在激励和行为方面存在巨大差异。其次，由于这一缺陷，该领域几乎没有根据来概括省级政府能够在日益全球化的经济和地方公民之间发挥积极调解作用的条件，正如许多联邦制支持者所断言的那样。第三，绝大多数关于省级财政政策的研究都集中在美国各州，这是相当反常的，并且为更广泛的省级财政绩效理论提供了有限的基础。即使研究人员已经开始研究其他地方财政政策的省际差异，也没有一项研究是明确比较的。方法：在建立省级财政行为的比较模型时，研究人员首先从他们自己的工作和其他最近的理论和实证文献中挑选出四个假设：(1)更依赖中央政府财政转移的省份更有可能出现更大的赤字。(2)在一定条件下，各级政府之间的共同党派关系对省级政府的预算约束产生激励作用。(3)增加对财政决策者的制衡的省级机构助长了超支。(4)缺乏竞争性省级政党制度的省份更有可能出现更大的赤字。研究人员检验了这些假设是否取决于每个国家财政和政治制度的各种其他特征。这个合作研究项目需要收集从1978年到20世纪90年代末18个联邦系统中每个省政府的可比政治、财政、宏观经济和人口数据。迄今为止，在各自大学的支持下，研究人员已经收集了阿根廷、澳大利亚、巴西、加拿大、德国、印度、墨西哥、尼日利亚、巴基斯坦、瑞士、美国和委内瑞拉的大量相关数据。调查人员寻求支持以完成剩余数据的收集、编码和组织，包括奥地利、比利时、马来西亚、俄罗斯、南非和西班牙的加入。广泛影响：研究人员将根据上述每个研究假设准备一系列文章，最终形成一本书手稿，供非专业人士阅读。这项研究具有非常重要的政策意义。重新设计财政联邦制的基本结构以改善财政纪律是许多联邦改革议程的首要任务，特别是那些因联邦制功能失调而遭受严重宏观经济后果的联邦。此外，该数据集将在互联网上提供给其他研究人员，并有可能成为比较政治学和经济学中经常使用的数据资源。未来使用的例子包括多层制度中的政治问责制、区域间不平等趋势、再分配和风险分担的研究。

This investigation supports the completion of a large data set that makes it possible to conduct comparative analysis of provincial-level fiscal performance in federations around the world. In recent years, central governments in federations have devolved profound functional responsibilities to provincial governments. Concurrently, there has been renewed interest in federalism as a tool to solve issues of regional governance in settings as diverse as the European Union and South Africa. At the same time, a number of researchers of Russia, Brazil, and Argentina have noted a common pathology whereby federations generate incentives for provincial politicians to over-fish the common pool of revenue, overspend in the expectation of national bailouts, and expend resources on the sustenance of political machines. As a result, the comparative investigation of federalism has become a booming research program at the intersection of political science, economics, and policy studies as researchers attempt to answer questions about the driving forces behind government fiscal decisions and more broadly, the nature of accountability in multi-tiered systems of government.Intellectual Merit: Current research on comparative federalism provides three justifications for the proposed research. First, while some researchers have begun to investigate the institutions that underpin divergent economic outcomes across federations, they have treated federations en toto. There is little recognition that provinces within federations vary dramatically in their incentives and behavior. Second, because of this shortcoming the field has little ground on which to generalize about the conditions under which provincial governments are able to serve a positive mediating role between an increasingly global economy and local citizens, as asserted by many proponents of federalism. Third, the vast majority of research on provincial fiscal policy focuses on the U.S. states, which are quite anomalous and provide a limited foundation for broader theorizing on provincial fiscal performance. Even where researchers have begun to address inter-provincial variations in fiscal policy elsewhere, none of this research has been explicitly comparative. Method: In developing a comparative model of provincial fiscal behavior the researchers begin with four hypotheses culled from their own work and other recent theoretical and empirical literature: (1) Provinces more dependent on fiscal transfers from the central government are more likely to run larger deficits. (2) Under some conditions shared partisanship across levels of government generates incentives for budgetary restraint on the part of provincial governments. (3) Provincial institutions that increase the number of checks and balances on fiscal decision-makers foster overspending. (4) Provinces that lack competitive provincial party systems are more likely to run larger deficits. The investigators test whether these hypotheses are contingent on a variety of other characteristics of each country's fiscal and political system. This collaborative research project requires the collection of comparable political, fiscal, macroeconomic, and demographic data on each provincial government in 18 federal systems from 1978 through the late 1990s. To date with support from their respective universities, the researchers have collected much of the relevant data for Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Switzerland, the United States, and Venezuela. The investigators seek support to complete the collection, coding, and organization of the remaining data, including the addition of Austria, Belgium, Malaysia, Russia, South Africa, and Spain. Broad Impact: The investigators will prepare a series of articles based on each of the research hypotheses above, eventually culminating in a book manuscript written for non-specialists. The research has very important policy implications. Redesigning the basic structure of fiscal federalism to improve fiscal discipline is at the top of the reform agenda in many federations.especially those that have suffered severe macroeconomic consequences of dysfunctional federalism. Moreover, the data set will be made available on the internet to other researchers, and has the potential to become an often-used data resources in comparative politics and economics. Examples of future uses include studies of political accountability in multi-tiered system, trends in inter-regional inequality, redistribution, and risk-sharing.