IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-00125753.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Local Public Choice in Representative Democracy: Which Theory Best Explains the Data ?

Author

Listed:
  • Benoît Le Maux

    (CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

This Ph.D. thesis tests the power of the median voter model against the respective strength of alternative models based on partisan politicians, bureaucracy, interest group and budgetary incrementalism theories. To execute this comparison, the four principal per capita operating expenditures of the French departments are used as dependent variables: (i) social assistance, (ii) economic services, (iii) maintenance of the road network and (iv) secondary schools. The overall conclusion made is that the median voter model is not the best model for explaining local governments' behavior. While the income and tax share of the median voter have together a significant impact on public expenditures, numerous econometric tests suggest that other factors significantly influence the French departments' policies. In other words, we cannot be entirely optimistic about the workings of local representative democracies.

Suggested Citation

  • Benoît Le Maux, 2009. "Local Public Choice in Representative Democracy: Which Theory Best Explains the Data ?," Post-Print halshs-00125753, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00125753
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Johanna Choumert & Laure Cormier, 2011. "The provision of urban parks: an empirical test of spatial spillovers in an urban area using geographic information systems," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 47(2), pages 437-450, October.
    2. Guy Gilbert & Alain Guengant & Benoît Le Maux & Yvon Rocaboy, 2012. "Une étude économétrique de la dépense publique locale: Le cas des départements français," Economics Working Paper Archive (University of Rennes & University of Caen) 201203, Center for Research in Economics and Management (CREM), University of Rennes, University of Caen and CNRS.
    3. Benoît Le Maux, 2009. "Governmental behavior in representative democracy: a synthesis of the theoretical literature," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 141(3), pages 447-465, December.
    4. Johanna Choumert & Walid Oueslati & Julien Salanié, 2008. "The effects of spatial spillovers on the provision of urban environmental amenities," Post-Print hal-00729739, HAL.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00125753. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.