Americans have a love-hate relationship with government. Rejecting bureaucracy — but not the goods and services the welfare state provides — Americans are insisting government be made to run like a business. But, as Constitutional Coup shows, separating the state from its public servants,...

We estimate a non-linear and discontinuous relationship between the tax level and the degree of alignment between the legislature and the governor, measured as the number of seats in the legislature that belong to the governor’s party. In the states with the line-item veto, there is a jump in...

According to our model effective 'budgetary' separation of power occurs in the states with the line-item veto when the Governor is not aligned with the Legislature. Only then is the Legislature, which approves the budget and sets the tax level, not the full residual claimant of a tax release....

A political regime has budgetary separation of powers if the power with the prerogative to raise taxes is not the full residual claimant of a tax increase. In the American states two conditions are needed: the governor must have the line item veto, and the political interests of the legislative...

We find the surprising result that the tax level is negatively correlated with the size of the Democratic majority in the interval in which the Democrats hold between 50 and 66% of the seats in the state Legislatures. This negative relationship suggests the failure of a simple ideological model...

We study changes in the form of government as an example of endogenously determined constitutions. For a sample of 202 countries over the period 1950–2006, we find that most changes are relatively small and roughly equally likely to be either in the direction of more parliamentarian or more...

Should the Federal government and the remaining American states adopt the line item veto? What are its effects? We use regression discontinuity design to claim that in states with the line item veto, divided government has a causal negative effect on the tax level. By investigating a panel of 38...

A country’s form of government has important economic and political consequences, but the determinants that lead societies to choose either parliamentary or presidential systems are largely unexplored. This paper studies this choice by analyzing the factors that make countries switch from...

A high degree of de facto judicial independence (JI) functions as a crucial precondition of governments to credibly commit to legislative decisions, such as respecting private property rights. Thus, de facto JI should improve the allocative efficiency and may therefore contribute positively to...

Based on data from the EU Justice Scoreboard, we identify a puzzle: National levels of judicial independence (as perceived by the citizens of EU member states) are negatively associated with the presence of formal legislation usually considered as conducive to judicial independence. We try to...