Taxation and Distributive Justice

Distributive justice concerns the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. Opposition to higher rates of taxation, or even existing levels of taxation, is often made on grounds that such taxes are unfair burdens. This fairness argument can be given a number of further, more-specific formulations. Libertarians, such as Robert Nozick, argue that taxation of income is unfair because it violates individual rights. They invoke an entitlement argument that presumes that the appropriate baseline of property rights is pretax income . Others take issue with specific policies that are supported by taxation, such as welfare provisions, and argue that welfare reform is necessary because tax burdens are only legitimate when they satisfy some form of reciprocity thesis . These arguments are critically assessed here in relation to three recent books – The Cost of Rights , The Myth of Ownership and The Civic Minimum – which explore different arguments often invoked in defence of tax cuts. Themes that raise important questions about taxation and justice are also examined – private property, welfare reform and inheritance. The real challenge facing justice theorists is to take scarcity seriously; thus, I emphasise the shortcomings of simply endorsing a 'cost-blind', rights-oriented conception of justice, which currently dominates debates in normative political theory.     

State Constitutional Limits on Legislative Procedure: Legislative Compliance and Judicial Enforcement

Most state constitutions contain detailed restrictions on thelegislative process. Violations of some of these restrictions(e.g., single-subject requirements) are reflected on the faceof a final enactment. Other violations (e.g., alteration ofa bill to change its original purpose) are not evident in thefinal enactment, but require investigation of the legislativeprocess. State courts have developed a variety of approachesto these second types of violations, from excluding all evidencebeyond the enactment to permitting any evidence of constitutionalviolations. The Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act was passedin apparent violation of both types of constitutional restrictions.The legislative debates reflected legislators' attitudes aboutsuch restrictions, but the Pennsylvania courts refuse to enforcethem. After surveying other judicial approaches, the articlediscusses the legislative and executive obligation to followconstitutional restrictions, regardless of judicial enforcement.The article then advocates increased judicial enforcement, whilemaintaining proper deference to the legislature.     

Dissolution Threats and Legislative Bargaining

Chief executives in many parliamentary democracies have the power to dissolve the legislature. Despite a well‐developed literature on the endogenous timing of parliamentary elections, political scientists know remarkably little about the strategic use of dissolution power to influence policymaking. To address this gap, we propose and empirically evaluate a theoretical model of legislative bargaining in the shadow of executive dissolution power. The model implies that the chief executive's public support and legislative strength, as well as the time until the next constitutionally mandated election, are important determinants of the use and effectiveness of dissolution threats in policymaking. Analyzing an original time‐series data set from a multiparty parliamentary democracy, we find evidence in line with key empirical implications of the model.     

Veto Rhetoric and Legislative Riders

Riders to appropriations bills have long been a favorite congressional instrument for forcing presidents to accept unwanted policies. To resist unwanted riders, presidents have increasingly resorted to veto threats. Are such threats credible, and do they influence legislation? To answer these questions, we analyze the legislative histories of hundreds of threatened and unthreatened riders from 1985 through 2008. We find that threats are effective in bringing the final legislation closer to the president's preferences. Threats achieve their success, in large part, by interrupting the textbook legislative process in the Senate—spawning filibusters, prompting leaders to punt bills to conference, and encouraging the use of other “unorthodox” procedures. Unlike conventional models that regard veto threats as minimally effective, the findings presented here depict veto rhetoric as integral to identifying critical riders separating the legislative parties that must be resolved in order to avoid gridlock and pass annual appropriations legislation.     

Legislative Capacity and Credit Risk

Legislatures differ in their institutional capacity to draft and enact policy. While strong legislatures can increase the congruence of policy outcomes to the electorate's preferences, they can also inject uncertainty into markets with their ability to alter the political economic landscape. We argue that this uncertainty will manifest in a state's ability to borrow and hypothesize a negative relationship between legislative capacity and creditworthiness. Using ratings of general obligation bonds issued by the American states over nearly two decades and data on the institutional capacity of state legislative assemblies, we find support for the claim that having a legislature that is better equipped to affect policy change increases credit risk evaluations. The results we present broaden our understanding of the importance of legislative institutions, the determinants of credit risk, and the economic implications of democratic responsiveness.     

Presidential Coattails and Legislative Fragmentation

Considerable evidence suggests that legislative fragmentation can negatively affect the survival of democratic presidential regimes. While there is a vast literature examining the determinants of legislative fragmentation, one factor that has traditionally been overlooked is the impact of presidential elections. Do presidential elections increase or decrease legislative fragmentation? Does it matter if presidents are elected by plurality rule or by runoff? Using a new dataset that covers all democratic legislative and presidential elections between 1946 and 2000, I find that presidential coattails can reduce, increase, or have no effect on legislative fragmentation depending on the number of presidential candidates. I also find strong evidence that social heterogeneity increases the number of presidential candidates when runoff systems are employed. Taken together, these results suggest that the widespread adoption of runoffs by newly democratic presidential regimes will likely increase legislative fragmentation, thereby putting their democratic survival at increased risk.     

Legislative Capacity and Executive Unilateralism

This article develops a theory of presidential unilateralism in which both ideological divergence with Congress and legislative capacity influence the president's use of executive orders. We argue that when Congress is less capable of constraining the executive, the president will issue more executive orders during periods of divided government. Conversely, in periods of high legislative capacity, the president is less likely to issue executive orders when faced with an opposed Congress. Based on an examination of institutional changes, we identify years prior to the mid‐1940s as characterized by low congressional capacity and the subsequent period as characterized by high capacity. Testing the theory between 1905 and 2013, we find strong support for these predictions and demonstrate that legislative capacity conditions the role of ideological disagreement in shaping presidential action. Overall, this article deepens our current understanding of the dynamics of separation‐of‐powers politics and the limits of executive power.     

Legislative budget cycles

Recent literature suggests that electoral budget cycles are a phenomenon of new rather than established democracies. What part of the democratization process explains the amelioration of the political budget cycle? We argue the answer lies (in part) in the development of a strong party system. We extend the classic Rogoff-Siebert model to show that political budget cycles are possible in a legislative context with rational voters. We then demonstrate that the development of a strong party system can restrain political budget cycles in a majoritarian electoral system. Finally, we follow prior work in using vote share volatility as a measure of the institutionalization of the party system. Using newly collected vote-share data for 433 elections for 90 democracies from 1980–2007, we calculate a measure of party institutionalization. We then use this data to demonstrate that institutionalized party systems are associated with mitigated political budget cycles, especially in majoritarian electoral systems.     

Legislative term limits and state spending

Supporters of legislative term limits often claim that they will lower state spending levels. Using fiscal data from 48 states from 1977 to 2001, this paper finds little support for this assertion. Instead, this analysis finds that states with term limits have higher spending levels than states without term limits. These results suggest that term limits give legislators greater incentives to deviate from socially optimal fiscal policy by altering the legislative environment in which such policy is formulated.     

现场指认及其立法规制

现场指认作为侦查机关经常采用的侦查行为,虽与讯问犯罪嫌疑人、现场勘查、侦查实验、辨认有一定联系,但就其性质而言,是一种相对独立的侦查行为。我国刑事司法实践中,现场指认存在一定问题:违反无罪推定原则,违反侦查秘密原则,可能侵犯犯罪嫌疑人权利和导致犯罪嫌疑人脱逃。为保障犯罪嫌疑人人权和规范侦查权力,有必要通过立法规制现场指认,具体包括:立法应明确规定现场指认,明确现场指认需遵循的原则,确立现场指认的具体程序。     

Nonpartisan Legislative Budget Offices: A Tentative Step toward Improving Legislative Oversight

Strengthening the budgetary powers of legislatures through nonpartisan budget offices adds to the capacity‐building repertoire of development donors. Budget offices are supposed to provide legislatures with information and analysis independent from the executive. The United States Agency for International Development believes that strengthening the legislature's power of the purse improves governance. We highlight USAID‐funded legislative strengthening projects implemented in Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, and Afghanistan to show how these budget offices function. There is a significant potential for these units to assist members of parliament in understanding the budget process, the broad fiscal challenges facing government, and expenditure control and budgetary trade‐offs that affect present and future spending. These cases demonstrate the challenges of creating and sustaining a parliamentary budget office. Finally, in an effort to make budget offices effective and sustainable, we outline several key steps that we believe are important both for donors and the legislative bodies.     

Legislative production and public spending in France

Public Choice - The aim of this article is to help explain the history of the public spending-to-GDP ratio in France by examining the production of laws and regulations. It empirically finds a...     

Valence,Elections, and Legislative Institutions

To the degree that voters care about competence, expertise, and other valence characteristics of their representatives and political parties care about winning elections, parties have an incentive to signal that their legislators have such characteristics. We construct a model of parties, motivated by both reelection and by policy, that attempt to signal individual incumbents' valences to voters through the assignment of these members to positions of authority. The model illustrates how electorally motivated party leaders will have an incentive to promote less competent incumbents than they would if voters did not make inferences from promotion decisions. We derive the model's empirical implications and test them with original data on the careers of Chilean senators serving between 1998 and 2013. In support of the model's insights, we find that promotion to a leadership position is an effective signal to voters only if the promoted incumbent has extreme views relative to the party.     

Local Taxation in the Netherlands

Provincial governments in the Netherlands have only one general tax at their disposal. However, it has become an insufficient source of revenue for this level of government in the Dutch system. To increase the revenue raising capacity of the provincial governments, thirteen broad-based general tax proposals not used at the local level were examined. The objective was to find a fair and equitable tax that could easily be collected and would result in fl. 200 million in additional revenue for the provincial governments.     

Legislative bargaining with costly communication

We investigate the effects of voting rules on delay in a multilateral bargaining experiment with costly communication. Our design is based on a variant of the Baron–Ferejohn framework. Communication takes place after a proposer is selected and before a proposal is made. In contrast to prior experiments, communication is directly associated with costs in our setup. Specifically, every second of communication increases the probability that the game is terminated before a proposal can be made. In case of ‘breakdown’, each player receives an exogenously fixed disagreement value. Those values sum up to less than the amount of the available surplus, implying that delay owing to communication is costly. We vary the decision rule (majority versus unanimity) as well as the distribution of disagreement values (symmetric or asymmetric). We find that unanimity rule leads to longer communication delays and more frequent breakdowns in asymmetric, but not in symmetric situations.

     

Spatial Models of Legislative Effectiveness

Spatial models of policymaking have evolved from the median voter theorem to the inclusion of institutional considerations such as committees, political parties, and various voting and amendment rules. Such models, however, implicitly assume that no policy is better than another at solving public policy problems and that all policy makers are equally effective at advancing proposals. We relax these assumptions, allowing some legislators to be more effective than others at creating high‐quality proposals. The resulting Legislative Effectiveness Model (LEM) offers three main benefits. First, it can better account for policy changes based on the quality of the status quo, changing our understanding of how to overcome gridlock in polarized legislatures. Second, it generalizes canonical models of legislative politics, such as median voter, setter, and pivotal politics models, all of which emerge as special cases within the LEM. Third, the LEM offers significant new empirical predictions, some of which we test (and find support for) within the U.S. Congress.