The rise of the digital economy reignites debates over the transformation of production in industrial economies. For several decades, analysts attempted to describe the central features of the next economic epoch with labels like the knowledge, information, or service economy. The conventional argument claimed that just as an agricultural economy gave way to a manufacturing economy, an industrial economy was giving way to a service economy. Hence, their arguments went, industrial production was of diminishing importance.

This essay examines the place of manufacturing in an emerging digital economy. In short, we argue that in order to understand the place of digital innovations in the production process, we require a new nomenclature, one stripped of the grime of the 19th century manufacturing. We will use the word “production,” almost a synonym for manufacturing, meaning the creation and making of a good. The real issues in a digital era with powerful ‘tools for thought’ and diffused “intelligence processing” then are quite basic. First, what creates value? The tools for thought permit not only new products, but also a segmentation of the market into different needs and an adaptation of products to the varied segments. Second, what permits control? Certainly, the formal character of digital information knowledge permitting control of the production and evolution of the product or service would be increasingly held as formal intellectual property rather than individual or organizationally specific know-how.

In this dissertation, I examine whether attributes of governments and political systems affect the accumulation of government debt in wealthy democracies, and whether voters hold governments accountable for fiscal outcomes. I begin by reevaluating the conclusions of prior research using alternative samples and model specifications. I find no consistent support for the hypotheses advanced in the most-cited papers on the topic. In the subsequent two chapters, I reexamine the electoral effects of macroeconomic and fiscal outcomes. I again find that the conclusions of the most-cited prior studies fail to reproduce out of sample and specification. However, I show that voters generally reward incumbent parties of the chief executive for economic growth and expansionary fiscal policies.

Turning from electoral effects to policy outcomes, I show that government cohesion has no non-negligible effect on changes in pension generosity in response to population aging. I then examine the relationship between fiscal constraints and welfare retrenchment. I show that support for welfare state expansion in the electoral manifestos of competitive and mainstream political parties increases with the government budget balance. To illustrate the importance of political and economic context in shaping the particular character of fiscal adjustments, I complete my empirical analysis with a case study of the austerity measures taken by the Cameron administration in the United Kingdom. I conclude the dissertation by advocating for greater research transparency. Researchers should acknowledge that many estimates presented in social-scientific studies are products of arbitrary or strategically chosen assumptions concerning sampling, measurement, and model specification.