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the way representation shapes incumbents' strategic interests, this topic puts
the focus on a largely overlooked aspect of the politics of fiscal institutions.
I explain the relationship among political representation, fiscal structures,
and inequality as the result of long-term historical processes rather than as
the exogenous effect of a set of intrinsically inegalitarian institutions. I show
that the association between federalism, decentralization, and inequality, far
from being a historical imperative, reflects a particular combination of socioe-
conomic and institutional variables. In doing so, I identify the specific societal
and institutional circumstances under which federalism and decentralization
can coexist with egalitarian redistribution. And thus, I challenge both the notion
that decentralized political structures are necessarily inegalitarian institutions
and the reductionist view that fiscal institutions simply follow directly from
income differences between regions.
The topic also speaks to the issue of institutional stability in federations.
The interplay between economic geography and representation emerges as
an important clue to understand why federal fiscal arrangements tend to be
“unstable by design” (Bednar
2008
). Whether of external or endogenous origin,
this topic points to distributive conflicts as a major engine of change in political
unions. In this context, the topic offers a different perspective on the interplay
between mobility and redistribution in political unions. By explaining how
mobility of unskilled labor and welfare dependents alter the incentives behind
the selection of fiscal structures, the topic provides an alternative to the ways
in which conventional economic theories of federalism have understood the
interplay between institutions and the behavior of economic factors. Mobility,
I argue, is not so much a factor that constrains redistribution in a decentralized
setting but a factor that facilitates the centralization of fiscal structures and
works to increase levels of interregional redistribution.
Empirically, the topic presents one of the first systematic analyses of the
politics behind the origins of fiscal structures in political unions. Such an anal-
ysis combines multilevel survey analysis of individual preferences, historical
analyses, and time-series cross-sectional analyses at the macro level. In the
context of these analyses the topic makes a novel use of microlevel house-
hold income surveys to map out the contours of economic geography in the
unions of interest, and to calculate measures of dispersion in the geography of
inequality, subsequently used as a predictor of the level of decentralization of
interpersonal redistribution. The use of household income surveys to capture
economic geography is embedded both in the historical analyses of the Euro-
pean Union, Canada, the United States, Germany, and Spain, and in a series of
cross-national statistical analyses of the political and economic determinants
of fiscal structures.
Last but not least, the topic contributes to the literature on comparative
institutions and institutional change. The topic theorizes fiscal structures as
the outcome of political agency. Actors are, in turn, constrained by economic
geography and political representation. The topic shows how, in the long
run, pressure for change can result either from long-term cumulative feedback
