Is it Economics or Politics? Trending Economic Factors and the Structure of Congress in the Growth of Government, 1930-2002 – revised version: Trending Economic Factors and the Structure of Congress in the Growth of Government, 1930–2002

We expand the investigation of the role of Congress in explanations of government growth, building on the work of Kau and Rubin (2002). In addition to reconsidering the importance of the median ideological position of elected representatives they introduced, we allow for the roles of majority party strength and of party control of Congress. We consider the relative importantce of the state of Congress and of trending supply and demand-side economic factors in the evolution and composition of federal spending since 1930, and we use the resulting model to simulate the consequences of the radical and historically unprecedented shift to the right of Congress in 1994/95.