Districting and Government Overspending

Abstract

Theories of government spending driven by a common‐pool problem in the fiscal revenues pool predict that greater districting of a political jurisdiction raises the scale of government. This paper presents evidence on this and related predictions from a cross section of city governments in the United States. The main finding is that, when other plausible determinants of government spending are controlled for, greater districting leads to a considerably greater scale of government activity. The results also show that at‐large electoral systems do not, and forms of government that concentrate powers in the office of the executive do, break this relationship.