Past Events

The means-ends question was a major topic of political debate throughout the twentieth century.  A whole range of Marxist, existentialist, progressive, anarchist, and anticolonial thinking wrestled with the legitimacy and efficacy of new forms of mass political action – such as the boycott or the general strike – as well as the specific question of the use of violence in politics, of what counts as coercion in politics and when it could be deemed permissible and necessary.  In this paper I situate Gandhi’s distinctive understanding of the means-ends question within this context and position Gandhi in relation to Trotsky and Dewey’s famous exchange as well as Weber’s intervention in ‘Politics as A Vocation.’ 

We explore how public spending responds to changes in the business cycle. We develop a political economy explanation of pro-cyclical spending where governments' incentives to deviate from a sustainable fiscal policy result from political conflict on the level of redistribution. This distributive conflict forces governments who represent more vulnerable economic actors to engage in more, rather than less, pro-cyclical spending. We assess the plausibility of the argument using data on government spending in Argentina over one hundred years of history. Given the structure of the data we fit an error-correction model and estimate the short-term elasticity of government spending to the business cycle while controlling for the long-term relationship between both series. We supplement the ECM tests with instrumental variables estimations. The results from the ECM and IV models provide support to our political economy
explanation: while democratic governments of all shades run pro-cyclical fiscal policies, the elasticity of public spending to the business cycle is greater under Peronist leaders. Alternative explanations based on ideology, institutions and external conditions seem to play a lesser role.

It is widely believed that multinational corporations favor international market liberalization.  Yet, an unregulated market is not their preferred outcome.  Given their profitability, MNCs are not averse to government use of non-tariff barriers.  The reason is that regulatory barriers have a fixed cost component, affecting smaller, less productive, domestic based exporters more than large multinationals.  Further, the interaction of government and firm interest explains the adoption of a variety of regulatory barriers to trade.  This has important consequences for the likelihood and extent of international cooperation.  I use a newly developed dataset of Technical Barriers to Trade as well as tariff rates from the the GATT Uruguay Round negotiations to show how reciprocal trade negotiators facing globalized production balance the benefits of market access against the interest of multinational firms.

In this paper, I argue that Huntington’s (1991) well-known waves of electoral democracy have triggered and been countervailed by waves of fiscal autocracy.  I document a dramatic increase, from 1875 to 2005, in the number and proportion of the world’s constitutions that mandate executive-favoring budgetary reversions.  After showing that such reversions can in theory eviscerate the legislature’s power of the purse, as traditionally defined, I show that they have several consequences one would expect, were they intended to establish fiscal autocracy.  In particular, governments operating under such reversions have more violent leadership transitions and less credible sovereign debt—controlling for country fixed effects, standard economic predictors of credit-worthiness, and electoral democracy.  Finally, I demonstrate that one’s picture of the progress of democracy over the last century and a half is much different, when one considers not just the executive’s vertical (electoral) accountability but also his/her horizontal accountability (to the legislature).