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element of the argument. And it is then complemented with a more historical,
qualitative approach regarding the preferences of key players during specific
historical experiences: the response of the two North American federations to
the Great Depression, the fiscal response to Reunification in Germany, and the
more recent attempts to decentralize the organization and provision of social
security in Spain.
Mobility and Fiscal Structures
The five cases studies in this topic offer good leverage to evaluate the empirical
plausibility of the argument's predictions. Recall that depending on its level and
composition, mobility affects the design of fiscal structures in two ways. First,
it operates as a risk multiplier across regions, therefore exposing all regions
equally to people's demand for redistribution, and reducing the incentives to
sustain separate systems of interpersonal redistribution. Second, precisely for
this reason, in unions with rich and specialized local economies, mobility creates
incentives to increase interregional redistribution. The idea is to use the latter
to limit mobility and preserve the workings of local economies.
This topic addresses the role of interregional labor mobility in several ways.
The comparison between the EU and Germany offers preliminary evidence on
the relationship between the scope of mobility and the scope of redistribution.
This comparison is further substantiated with a quantitative analysis of the
impact of mobility on interregional redistribution. In turn, I pursue the identi-
fication of the marginal effects of mobility through two natural experiments
24
:
a comparison of the responses of Canada and the United States to the Great
Depression, and an analysis of the way Germany responded to the fiscal chal-
lenge of Reunification. The former illuminates the importance of mobility on
decisions about the centralization of interpersonal redistribution. The latter
illuminates the role of mobility in shaping rich regions' incentives to engage in
cross-regional redistribution. As I argue in detail in
Chapter 3
, both events were
the result of processes unrelated to preexisting fiscal structures and resulted in
differential patterns of mobility across the three unions. Together these analy-
ses shed considerable light on the role of mobility in shaping fiscal structures
across political unions.
From Preferences to Outcomes: The Mediating Role
of Political Representation
In addressing the transition from preferences to outcomes, this topic takes
three steps. First, the comprehensive overview of fiscal structures in the EU and
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Throughout this topic I use the term natural experiment loosely, referring to situations in which
an exogenous phenomenon results in the allocation of two cases that receive a differential
treatment of an independent variable of interest and are otherwise very similar. The idea is
to exploit history to locate case comparisons “as if” they were randomly assigned to different
treatments (Dunning
2008
).
