Young Scholar Workshop No.8

Title: 

Partisan Politics in the Fiscal Relationship between American Subnational Governments

Time: 

12:30-13:30 (Beijing Time), Nov 8th

Speaker: 

Assis. Prof. Wenchi Wei, Renmin University of China

Host:

Prof. Mark D. Robbins，Fudan University

Discussant: 

Prof. Ping Zhang， Fudan University

Venue: 

Room 805E, 8th Floor, West Sub-building of Guanghua Towers

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The Speaker：

Wenchi Wei is an assistant professor in the School of Public Administration and Policy at Renmin University of China. Wenchi Wei’s research focuses on government budgeting and finance, public sector performance management, and public policy evaluation. His research has been published by prestigious academic journals such as JPART, PAR, Governance, ARPA, PMR, Public Choice, Chinese Public Administration (in Chinese), Journal of Public Administration (in Chinese), and China Public Administration Review (in Chinese). He has received research grants from the National Natural Science Foundation and Beijing Social Science Foundation.

Abstract:

This study examines how partisan alignment between county legislators and the state government can affect intergovernmental fiscal transfers, testing the ally and anti-ally hypotheses. Theoretically, politically motivated state politicians would allocate more fiscal resources to counties with aligned local politicians, thereby reducing policy coordination costs. Nevertheless, state politicians may exploit partisan alignment to alleviate rat races among county politicians for state-held common-pool fiscal resources. Regression discontinuity analyses utilizing a dataset covering county legislative elections spanning 1970-2016 show that partisan alignment reduces per capita state-county fiscal transfers by 2.1%-5.5%, and this effect is contingent upon the power structure of county councils and the resource abundance of state governments.