The impact of citizen influence on local government expenditure

This paper examines the impact of three measures of direct citizen influence — the initiative, referendum, and recall — on the level of local public expenditure for a national sample of communities with 10,000 persons or more. Two types of statistical tests are performed to analyze the role of the median voter model and to measure the effect of these governmental characteristics on the level of public spending. Like earlier literature, this paper finds only modest effects of these structural characteristics on local government expenditure. Alternative methodologies are needed to explore the ambiguities which exist in many of the previous studies.