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separable aspects of political unions, even though they partially coevolve over
time. Empirically, the goal of evaluating the causal role of economic geography,
mobility, and representation imposes a number of constraints on the selection
of cases.
First, in gaining historical perspective and leverage over causality, it is essen-
tial to stop somewhere. Hence, this topic is not concerned with the formation
of unions. While the role of economic geography in the formation of unions is
a fascinating issue (Beramendi and Wibbels
2010
), it falls outside the empirical
realm of this study. This topic focuses on unions whose existence predates the
conflict over fiscal structures.
Second, there needs to be variation in the organization of political repre-
sentation. To evaluate the process by which changes in economic geography
impact fiscal structures over time under different systems of representation, it is
essential to have cases with different status quo (centrifugal versus centripetal).
This facilitates the study of how status quo in terms of representation mediates
the effects of a changing economic geography. In addition, it also facilitates
the analysis of how deviations over time with respect to the status quo in
terms of representation affect the evolution of fiscal structures. Finally, the
identification of marginal effects requires stricter conditions, namely, a quasi-
experimental setting in which an exogenous change in the variable of interest
(say, the geography of income or mobility) occurs when other elements of
the analysis (for example, political representation) can credibly be considered
given.
The implementation of these criteria, which I discuss in detail in
Chapter 3
,
yields five cases of interest: the European Union, the United States, Canada,
Germany, and Spain. The investigation of these cases, combined with a set of
cross-national statistical analyses, constitute the empirical core of the topic. I
close this section by outlining how they speak to each of the elements of the
argument: the impact of economic geography on preferences for fiscal struc-
tures, the role of mobility in shaping interpersonal and interregional redistri-
bution in political unions, and finally, how political representation mediates
the transition from preferences to outcomes.
Economic Geography and Preferences
To establish the effect of the geography of income and economic specializa-
tion on preferences for fiscal structures this topic combines several approaches.
Whenever possible, alas only in the case of the EU, I resort to statistical analyses.
The goal is to provide sound evidence that macrolevel indicators of crossre-
gional differences in terms of income and specialization do predict individual
preferences for fiscal structures. In the case of the EU, I also explore quan-
titatively the impact of economic geography on the preferences of, on the
one hand, political parties and trade unions, and on the other government
executives. This latter analysis focuses on countries' positions during the Con-
stitutional Convention. It produces direct quantitative evidence for the first
