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Hunting the Whale: More Evidence on State Government Leviathans
Author(s) -
Campbell Noel D.,
Finney R. Zachary,
Mitchell David T.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
southern economic journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.762
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 2325-8012
pISSN - 0038-4038
DOI - 10.1002/j.2325-8012.2007.tb00853.x
Subject(s) - government (linguistics) , leviathan (cipher) , state (computer science) , politics , economics , power (physics) , empirical evidence , government spending , public economics , political economy , positive economics , political science , market economy , law , statistics , philosophy , linguistics , physics , mathematics , algorithm , quantum mechanics , computer science , welfare , epistemology
Caplan holds that governments are Leviathans, seeking to extend their power by increasing government expenditures beyond the level preferred by voters. We extend Caplan's model by examining the real (percentage) growth rates of government. We also examine whether government size increases at an increasing rate as the minority party weakens. We find evidence that supports and fails to support the original Leviathan hypothesis. We also fail to support our extensions of Caplan's hypothesis. Furthermore, our significant and contrary results have intuitively appealing interpretations. From these results, we conclude that the impact of political party power on government spending is ambiguous.