Is it Economics or Politics? Trending Economic Factors and the Structure of Congress in the Growth of Government, 1930-2002 – revised version: Trending Economic Factors and the Structure of Congress in the Growth of Government, 1930–2002

Stanley Winer (stanley.winer@carleton.ca), Michael W. Tofias (tofias@uwm.edu), Bernard Grofman (bgrofman@uci.edu) and John H. Aldrich (aldrich@duke.edu)
Additional contact information
Michael W. Tofias: Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/tofias/www/
Bernard Grofman: Department of Political Science, University of California, Irvine, http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2564
John H. Aldrich: Department of Political Science, Duke University, http://people.duke.edu/~aldrich/

No 07-04, Carleton Economic Papers from Carleton University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We expand the investigation of the role of Congress in explanations of government growth, building on the work of Kau and Rubin (2002). In addition to reconsidering the importance of the median ideological position of elected representatives they introduced, we allow for the roles of majority party strength and of party control of Congress. We consider the relative importantce of the state of Congress and of trending supply and demand-side economic factors in the evolution and composition of federal spending since 1930, and we use the resulting model to simulate the consequences of the radical and historically unprecedented shift to the right of Congress in 1994/95.

Keywords: public expenditure; Congress; ideology; party strength; female labor force participation; trending versus stationary variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H1 H3 H5 H6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2007-04-28, Revised 2008-01-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-pbe and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published: Revised version: Trending Economic Factors and the Structure of Congress in the Growth of Government, 1930–2002, Public Choice, Vol. 135, No. 3/4 (June 2008), pp. 415–448

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.carleton.ca/economics/wp-content/uploads/cep07-04.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:car:carecp:07-04

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
economics@carleton.ca

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Carleton Economic Papers from Carleton University, Department of Economics C870 Loeb Building, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa Ontario, K1S 5B6 Canada.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Court Lindsay (courtney.lindsay@carleton.ca).