Political institutions and social spending changes in the world, 1998-2009

Controlling for several factors, what are the effects of different forms of political institutions on different types of social spending? An abundance of research on political institutions has demonstrated substantial evidence of their theoretical and empirical usefulness for determining different political outcomes. The institutions that a political system operates under can, among many other things, cultivate different incentives for elected officials to behave chiefly in a delegate role toward their constituencies or, conversely, to cultivate strong incentives for individual name recognition and credit claiming behavior in a free agent role of representation. The political bargaining process itself, based on the number of effective policy blocking institutions within the political system, is contingent on the country’s domestic institutional arrangement. These incentives, though the subject of a good deal of scholarly attention , also lend themselves to varying degrees of ability for pressure groups to form and protect the status quo in an age of changing social spending policies, many of which are more or less susceptible to interest groups pressures for various reasons. That is, more centralized political systems are often more difficult for interest groups to “capture” due to the lobby size that would be required to do so, relative to more diffused power arrangements where there are presumably more opportunities for groups to assert themselves. Of course, the type of social spending and its beneficiaries makes a crucial difference in this scenario as well; social spending measures that are designed to be for the public good that cannot be administratively controlled within a specific district, for example, vary from spending policies that can be controlled and credit-claimed. Despite widespread attention to democratic institutions, little has been done to systematically evaluate the effect of these different institutions on different types of social spending programs, providing a gap in both the institutional and the social spending literature. This dissertation will repeatedly attempt to close these gaps by unpacking both the democratic institutions and the types of social spending. I will argue and attempt to provide empirical evidence to support that, above all, political institutions have divergent, independent, and pronounced effects on different social spending programs.