UC San Diego

An extensive literature in political science focuses on government expenditures. In my dissertation, however, I focus on taxation, because governments must tax their citizens in order to engage in any of the choices about distributing that revenue. Each empirical chapter in this dissertation examines a different aspect of tax policy. In "Trading Policy" I argue that political parties have been central to trade policy in the United States, which runs contrary to the dominant demand-side explanations for trade policy. The research design I use allows me to account for a variety of different constituent factors that could influence voting, and then determine if party has any effect beyond constituent interests. The results suggest that party plays a significant role in legislative voting on trade policy once we account for constituency effects. In "Tax Man Cometh" (co-authored with Lissa Ziegler) we examine how a state's choice of tax policy reveals information about state capabilities. In particular, we focus on establishing the validity of a new construct for state capacity - income taxation. We argue that to measure a state's relative level of capacity we should look at the ratio of income taxes to total taxes collected by the state. We demonstrate that this is a valid measure for our construct of state capacity. In "Diffusion of State Tax and Expenditure Limits" Ellen Moule and I focus how state tax and expenditure limits (TELs) diffuse across the U.S. states. First, we argue that to understand policy diffusion requires paying attention to policy proposals as well as policy adoptions. Second, we separately model the determinants of exposure to a policy and then, conditional on exposure, the determinants of policy adoption. We find that proposal of a tax and expenditure limit is significantly related to whether states with similar income levels have previously adopted a TEL. Taken together these chapters help us to understand the determinants of tax policy and also what we can infer about a particular country based on its choices of tax policy