A reform in the German state of Hesse selectively shifted the responsibility for overseeing and enforcing a balanced budget rule at the municipal level. This involved transferring the responsibility from a politically affiliated county administrator to a non-political and potentially more impartial fiscal supervisor at a higher administrative layer. We empirically examine if this change reveals biases that existed before this centralization of oversight. Our findings indicate that municipalities closer to the political supervisors reduced their cash loans more significantly and displayed lower deficits under the subsequent neutral supervisor. This suggests that geographically closer municipalities were treated preferentially by the politically affiliated supervisor. We find no systematic impact on the enforcement of the fiscal rule based on the political alignment between the supervisor and the mayor or the party ideology of the supervisor.

This paper investigates how political alignment affects the implementation of punitive welfare measures in the UK. In particular, we examine whether a legislator's party affiliation affects the rate of sanctions to unemployment benefits in the MP's constituency. We use a regression discontinuity design based on close elections to compare the sanction rates across constituencies that are marginally aligned or unaligned with the central government. We find that implementation of the sanction regime is significantly more lenient in constituencies won by the government parties. The RD estimate indicates a drop of .8 percentage points at the cut-off, implying on average 18 % lower sanction rates in Coalition controlled constituencies. Our findings suggest that legislators are able to influence national, rule-based policies, even within a highly centralized system. Such pork barrel politics that can undermine institutions that should be neutral to local partisan considerations.

We study how political competition and political alignment affect local policy initiatives using the case of the Korean local childbirth grant program, a one-time cash grant that a local government autonomously provides to a newborn’s family financed by its discretionary budget. Both political competition within the locality and political alignment between the central and local governments are expected to cause an earlier adoption of the grant because it is favored both by local voters and the central government. Results from a survival analysis provide supporting evidence for this view.

We investigate how institutions granting voters veto power over legislation or requiring durable legislative coalitions affect regulatory activity. In a difference-in-differences design with unique panel data from the Swiss cantons in 1908-2020, we estimate the impact of mandatory legislative referendums and second reading requirements on the number of changes to statutory enactments. Both institutions substantially reduce regulatory activity. In particular, the abolishment of mandatory legislative referendums increases regulatory activity by around 50 percent. Our results suggest that regulation tend to benefit narrow interests rather than voters at large.