Leviathan governments have a single goal in mind: to maximize tax revenues. This dissertation looks at some of the possible constraints that Leviathan governments face in their quest for growth. In particular, we are interested in the effects of intergovernmental competition as a constraint on Leviathan government size. / The standard theory of intergovernmental competition concludes that if migration costs are low, and districts are good substitutes, then competing governments (even revenue-maximizing governments) will not be able to exploit their citizens through excessive taxation. To do so would encourage their taxpayers to flee to other less intrusive governments. / Federalism is a way for a single government to artificially introduce some aspects of intergovernmental competition. By decentralizing the authority to raise and spend tax revenues, the federal system creates a competitive insurance policy against exploitative government. With the wide range of degrees of federalism across nations and states, the Leviathan view holds that centralized governments should be larger than decentralized ones, all things being equal. In centralized governments the internal competitive constraint is weaker, thus leaving room for Leviathan to increase taxation. / We used three data sets: international, state and local, and state educational, to determine if centralization of government tends to increase government size as predicted by Leviathan. Our results from all three samples are mildly supportive of this view. / In addition, we feel the results are strong enough to reject the notion that government centralization encourages cost savings that tend to reduce government size. This result, in itself, is a valuable piece of evidence against the trend towards increasing consolidation of government on economies of scale grounds. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-07, Section: A, page: 2469. / Major Professor: James D. Gwartney. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76672 |
| Contributors | Lawson, Robert Allen., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 134 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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