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

这项调查有助于完成一个大型数据集，使人们能够对世界各地联邦的省级财政业绩进行比较分析。近年来，联邦制的中央政府将重大的职能责任下放给了省级政府。与此同时，人们重新对联邦制产生了兴趣，认为这是解决欧洲联盟和南非等不同背景下的区域治理问题的一种工具。与此同时，俄罗斯、巴西和阿根廷的一些研究人员注意到了一种共同的病理学，即联邦制激励省级政客过度捕捞公共收入，在国家救助的预期下超支，并将资源用于维持政治机器。因此，联邦制的比较研究成为政治学、经济学和政策学交叉领域的一个蓬勃发展的研究项目，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，多层次政府系统中问责制的性质的问题。学术价值：目前关于比较联邦制的研究为拟议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支撑不同联邦经济结果的制度，但他们对联邦进行了全面的研究。很少有人认识到，联邦内的各省在激励和行为上存在巨大差异。第二，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当地公民之间发挥积极调解作用的条件，正如许多联邦制的支持者所主张的那样。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，这是非常反常的，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，这些研究都没有明确的比较。 方法：在建立省级财政行为的比较模型时，研究者开始从他们自己的工作和其他最近的理论和经验文献中挑选出四个假设：（1）更依赖中央政府财政转移支付的省份更有可能出现更大的赤字。(2)在某些情况下，各级政府之间的党派之争会促使省政府限制预算。(3)省级机构增加了对财政决策者的制衡，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。研究人员测试这些假设是否取决于每个国家的财政和政治制度的其他各种特征。 这项合作研究项目需要收集1978年至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。研究人员寻求支持以完成剩余数据的收集、编码和组织，包括增加奥地利、比利时、马来西亚、俄罗斯、南非和西班牙。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，最终为非专业人士撰写一本书。 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重中之重，特别是那些因功能失调的联邦制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和经济学中经常使用的数据资源。未来用途的例子包括多层次系统中的政治问责制，区域间不平等的趋势，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.