Political Economy Commons^™

Keep Charitable Oversight In The Irs, Philip Hackney

Articles

Critics are increasingly calling for Congress to remove charity regulation from the IRS. The critics are wrong. Congress should maintain charity regulation in the IRS. What is at stake is balancing power between the state, charity as civil society, and the economic order. In a well-balanced democracy, civil society maintains its independence from the state and the economic order. Removing charitable jurisdiction from the IRS would blind the IRS to dollars placed in charitable solution increasing tax and political shelters and wealthy dominance of charities as civil society. A new agency without understanding of, or jurisdiction over, tax cannot act …

Written Testimony Of Philip Hackney For The Hearing On Growth Of The Tax-Exempt Sector And The Impact On The American Political Landscape (U.S. House Ways & Means Subcommittee On Oversight, December 13, 2023), Philip Hackney

Testimony

In written testimony before the House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Oversight on December 13, 2023, Professor Hackney emphasized three points about tax-exempt organizations and politics: (1) a diverse nonprofit sector that fosters civic participation and engagement is a gem of the United States -- we should maintain that; (2) the IRS budget for Exempt Organizations continues to NOT be sufficient to ensure the laws are equally and fairly enforced; and (3) there are simple things the IRS could do to enforce the law that it is not doing.

A More Capacious Concept Of Church, Philip Hackney, Samuel D. Brunson

Articles

United States tax law provides churches with extra benefits and robust protection from IRS enforcement actions. Churches and religious organizations are automatically exempt from the income tax without needing to apply to be so recognized and without needing to file a tax return. Beyond that, churches are protected from audit by stringent procedures. There are good reasons to consider providing a distance between church and state, including the state tax authority. In many instances, Congress granted churches preferential tax treatment to try to avoid excess entanglement between church and state, though that preferential treatment often just shifts the locus of …

Is Democracy Good For Growth? Development At Political Transition Time Matters, Di Sima, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Is democracy a better political regime for economic prosperity than autocracy? This paper shows that the answer depends on the initial economic development level during the democratic transition when the foundation of institutions was laid. Democracy facilitates growth only in countries that already have adequate development at transition time. These countries are more likely to create and sustain growth-enhancing institutions than others. Without appropriate development, democracy does not improve growth; this applies to about 40% of the third-wave democratized countries. These results are based on a sample of 153 countries in 1960–2010 and robust to various specifications and endogeneity issues.

Assessing The Impact Of Inequality On Political Activity And Class Consciousness, Matthew Prouty

Thinking Matters Symposium

Since 1980, the United States has experienced stagnating wages, higher levels of inequality, and intensifying political polarization. Despite this, U.S. domestic economic policy has not undergone the fundamental transformation needed to combat these systemic challenges. Why have these policies remained in place when they have a negative impact on the aggregate working class, and why has the working class not used American Democracy to change these policies? Could it be that the rising inequality has led to reduced political engagement with the remaining voters being more devout participants to their ideology than effective policy? Although there is an abundance of …

Written Testimony Of Philip Hackney For The Hearing On Laws And Enforcement Governing The Political Activities Of Tax-Exempt Entities (U.S. Senate Finance Committee Subcommittee On Taxation And Irs Oversight, May 4, 2022), Philip Hackney

Testimony

Are tax laws and IRS enforcement up to the task of overseeing the tax issues associated with the political activities of tax-exempt organizations? Though the tax laws governing the tax-exempt realm are wanting, our overall legal structure is not bad. It is justifiable at least. Where we fall down as a nation in this space is in the enforcement. We do not allocate enough resources to this arena, and we do not institutionally offer the support necessary to enforce these laws. These failures do not favor one party over the other but favor those interests in the country with the …

The Effect Of National Leaders’ Profiles On Gdp Per Capita, Maha Mostafa Gaber

Theses and Dissertations

A national leader is the policy maker in a country, whose economical decisions hold the power to make a nation either prosper or collapse. Therefore, it becomes crucial to understand the official who enact these decisions. A unique dataset of over 326 world leaders from 51 countries between the period 1972 to 2018 was constructed, building on leader Experience and Attribute Descriptions Database, in order to study the differences in leaders’ characteristics and determine the most important attributes which significantly affect level of GDP per capita. This paper studies the effect of government leaders’ profiles on GDP per capita by …

Dark Money Darker? Irs Shutters Collection Of Donor Data, Philip Hackney

Articles

The IRS ended a long-time practice of requiring most nonprofits to disclose substantial donor names and addresses on the nonprofit annual tax return. It is largely seen as a battle over campaign finance rather than tax enforcement. Two of the nonprofits involved, social welfare organizations and business leagues, are referred to as “dark money” organizations because they allow individuals to influence elections while maintaining donor anonymity. Many in the campaign finance community are concerned that this change means wealthy donors can avoid campaign finance laws and have no reason to fear being discovered. In this Article, I focus on whether …

The Developmental State And Public Participation: The Case Of Energy Policymaking In Post-Fukushima Japan, Hiro Saito

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government tried to democratize energy policy-making by introducing public participation. Over the course of its implementation, however, public participation came to be subordinated to expert committees as the primary mechanism of policy rationalization. The expert committees not only neutralized the results of public participation but also discounted the necessity of public participation itself. This trajectory of public participation, from its historic introduction to eventual collapse, can be fully explained only in reference to complex interactions between the macroinstitutions and microsituations of Japanese policy-making at the time of the nuclear disaster: the macroinstitutional …

Economic Insecurity And Social Stability: An Exploration Of One Of Capitalism’S Vicious Cycles, Costas Panayotakis

Publications and Research

This article analyzes how capitalism’s connection to economic insecurity can, rather than fomenting social unrest, facilitate its reproduction. Also responding to contrasts in the literature between rising insecurity in recent decades and the containment of insecurity in capitalism’s post-war ‘golden age,’ this article explains why growing insecurity is more consistent with capitalism’s normal operation. Underlining the difficulty of replicating post-war efforts to mitigate insecurity through social and welfare policies, this article also sketches how the vicious cycle between capitalism and economic insecurity contributes to other serious social problems, including racism, sexism, xenophobia, the hollowing out of political democracy and a …

The Effects Of Economic And Political Globalization On Level Of Democracy, Julianna R. Pestretto

Student Publications

Since the birth of the nation state, we have been undergoing a process called globalization. Simply put, globalization is the process of interaction and integration among the people, companies and governments of different nations. It is a process driven by trade and investment and supported by economic partnerships and institutions. As time goes on, the effects of globalization have become more intense, and are felt disproportionately across nations and socio-economic levels, resulting in a backlash that has been largely characterized by the rise of right-wing populism. It is thus important to study the effects that globalization has on level of …

Healthy And Unhealthy Responses To American Democratic Institutional Failure, Thomas D'Anieri

CMC Senior Theses

I have set out on the hunch that politics in America “feels different,” that we are frustrated both with our institutions as well as with one another. First, I will seek to empirically verify this claim beyond mere “feelings.” If it can be shown that these kinds of discontent genuinely exist to the extent that I believe they do, I will then explain why people feel this way and why things are different this time from the economic, political, and social points of view. Next, I will examine two potential responses, what I will call the populist and the institutional …

The Effect Of Perceived Corruption On Voter Turnout In Post-Communist Countries In The European Union: Evidence From The Life In Transition Survey Iii, Ivana Pancurakova

Theses and Dissertations

This paper measures the effect of perceived corruption on voting in post-communist countries in the EU using probit models, Dong and Lewbel’s special estimator, and two stage least squares models. Corruption has a significant and negative effect on voter turnout even when controlling for the endogeneity in the corruption variable.

Is Authoritarianism Bad For The Economy? Ask Venezuela – Or Hungary Or Turkey, Nisha Bellinger, Byunghwan Son

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Democracy is at risk worldwide. And the economy may be, too.

Seventy-one out of the world’s 195 countries saw their democratic institutions erode in recent years, according to the 2018 year-end report by democracy watchdog Freedom House, a phenomenon known as “democratic backsliding.” Signs of backsliding include elected leaders who expand their executive powers while weakening the legislature and judiciary, elections that have become less competitive and shrinking press freedom.

Health Care's Market Bureaucracy, Allison K. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

The last several decades of health law and policy have been built on a foundation of economic theory. This theory supported the proliferation of market-based policies that promised maximum efficiency and minimal bureaucracy. Neither of these promises has been realized. A mounting body of empirical research discussed in this Article makes clear that leading market-based policies are not efficient — they fail to capture what people want. Even more, this Article describes how the struggle to bolster these policies — through constant regulatory, technocratic tinkering that aims to improve the market and the decision-making of consumers in it — has …

Political Accountability And Determinants Of Governance Under Principal-Agent Theory, Matthew Bluem

Dissertations

This study examines the theory that quality of governance is largely dependent upon political accountability, and that the effect of political accountability on governance varies based on three main determinants: level of democracy, level of information available to the public, and diversification of the economy (Adserà et al. 2003). With quality of governance, represented by the World Bank’s World Governance Indicators (WGI), as the dependent variable, this study considers how these three independent variables, and several control variables, affect governance quality. Incorporating data from 2010 – 2015 for 143 countries in both cross-sectional OLS and fixed effects panel regression analysis, …

Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the past forty-years, neoliberal education reform policies in the U.S. have spurred significant resistance, often galvanized by claims that such policies undermine public education as a vital institution of U.S. democracy. Within this narrative, many activists call to “save our schools” and return them to a time when public schools served the common good. With these narratives in mind, I explore the foundational and persistent power structures that characterize the U.S. as a means to reveal the fundamental purpose of its public education system. The questions that guide my research include: (1) With an understanding that capitalism, white supremacy, …

Madison Vanguard: A Novel, Berni Moestafa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project takes the form of a popular fiction novel that introduces parts of the academic discussion on capitalism to a wider audience through storytelling. Using a fictional fiscal crisis in New York as its setting, the novel discusses the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It therefore aims to address the underrepresentation of the debate on capitalism in popular entertainment and raise awareness about some of the debate’s key issues.

Popular culture be that music, film, books, media, videogames or advertisement surround our lives and expose us to a plethora of messages that help shape our understanding of the …

Coup D'État And International Trade, Brian Alan Childers

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Moral Sanctions With Immoral Impacts, Camille Sachs

International Political Economy Theses

This paper looks at whether or not economic sanctions employed to reduce human rights abuses and regime change able to effectively achieve their stated goals. The 1990s saw a large increase in the utilization of sanctions as a less violent method of diplomatic force, alternative to warfare. However, scholars have debated whether or not economic sanctions are an improvement from warfare given the humanitarian suffering that they create and their relatively low success rate. Due to the low success rate of economic sanctions overall, it is often argued that sanctions are used to generate a diplomatic stance in the international …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

The (Small) Blessing Of Foreign Aid: Further Evidence On Aid's Impact On Democracy, John Thornton

John Thornton

In an empirical contribution to the literature of foreign aid, we estimate the impact of foreign aid on democracy in a panel of 93 developing economies during 1971–2010. We find that foreign aid promotes democracy, with the result robust to different estimation methodologies and control variables and to instrumenting for foreign aid.

From Coercion To Politics To Law: The Evolution Of Property Rights Protection, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper shows how property rights security improves over time as a result of increasing legal quality and political democratization in a political economy context, where political and legal institutions adapt to evolving factor composition of land and capital in the dynamic economic development process. There seems to exist a clear sequence of di⁄erent forms of protection in that it is unlikely to have a strong rule of law with an exploitative political regime, or to have a democratic political system when the distribution of potential coercive power is too skewed. The routine form of protection thus shifts from coercion …

Neoliberalism And The Law: How Historical Materialism Can Illuminate Recent Governmental And Judicial Decision Making, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Neoliberalism can be understood as the deregulation of the economy from political control by deliberate action or inaction of the state. As such it is both constituted by the law and deeply affects it. I show how the methods of historical materialism can illuminate this phenomenon in all three branches of the the U.S. government. Considering the example the global financial crisis of 2007-08 that began with the housing bubble developing from trade in unregulated and overvalued mortgage backed securities, I show how the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which established a firewall between commercial and investment banking, allowed this …

Demography, Development And The Origin Of Democracy: A Model With Case Studies Of Arachic Athens And Maritime England, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

No abstract provided.

Challenges Of The Cooperative Movement In Addressing Issues Of Human Security In The Context Of A Neoliberal World: The Case Of Argentina, Stefan Ivanovski

Stefan Ivanovski

The response of some Argentine workers to the 2001 crisis of neoliberalism gave rise to a movement of worker-recovered enterprises (empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores or ERTs). The ERTs have emerged as former employees took over the control of generally fraudulently bankrupt factories and enterprises. The analysis of the ERT movement within the neoliberal global capitalist order will draw from William Robinson’s (2004) neo-Gramscian concept of hegemony. The theoretical framework of neo-Gramscian hegemony will be used in exposing the contradictions of capitalism on the global, national, organizational and individual scales and the effects they have on the ERT movement. The …

Democratic Strength And Terrorism: An Economic Approach, Brian P. Winter

CMC Senior Theses

There has been much literature about the economic effects of terrorism in democratic countries, but this literature often considers democracy to be a binary variable. This paper sought to explore how the effects might differ depending on the strength of a democracy. In the end, I found that the numbers of attacks and the effects of those attacks do not follow a linear path. The results for autocracies and anocracies require further analysis, but democracies have revealed interesting results. It seems that democracies as a whole have more terrorist attacks, but, within this group, the more democratic a country is …

From Riches To Rags: The Political Economy Of The Natural Resource Curse, Anum Malkani

CMC Senior Theses

The natural resource curse paradox has given rise to a wide range of explanations, which look at the economic, social and political characteristics of resource-rich countries. This paper focuses on the political economy of natural resources and finds that controlling for sociopolitical factors eliminates the natural resource curse. The analysis then turns to these sociopolitical factors and examines the significant, complex and varied effects of democratization on economic growth in general, as well as in resource-rich countries in particular. I conclude that the type of institutions needed for economic development in resource-rich countries are not specific to either democratic or …

Sheep And Their Herders: Testing The Myth Of Rational Voters – A Latvian Case Study, Daniel Brou, Kirk Collins, Brent Mckenzie

Daniel Brou

Through the use of a simple behavioural political economy model, we cast doubt on the assumption that voters behave in predictable ways dependent on their expected support for government policies. We show that under certain conditions an unfavourable (i.e. welfare reducing) policy may result, even with well-informed, welfare maximising voters. While true that voter behaviour may align with government policies, this alignment has more to do with a perceived lack of influence, rather than policy support. The case of Latvia's accession to the European Union is used as a case study to evaluate the government's policy in terms of voting …

Opinion Polls And Presidential Campaign In Colombia, Fernando Estrada

Fernando Estrada

The polls, these surveys do not withstand any rigorous testing. And contrary to expand the formation of public opinion, impaired. To overcome this defect should propose means fewer surveys and more discussions. Presidential campaigns should seek democratic enlargement, and a less massive media exposure to foot the surveys. Simplify