The literature on tax competition across countries for mobile firms has largely ignored the firm. In this paper I utilize aspects of the bargaining literature on firmgovernment relations to examine the firm and country level determinants of tax policy. Using a confidential data set on firm tax payments from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis I show that: 1) there are large variations within countries on the tax burdens faced by firms, 2) parent level factors strongly influence the ability of firms to be exempted from corporate taxation and 3) political institutions strongly affect both exemptions from corporate taxes and the level of corporate taxes paid. The statistical analysis of firmlevel data on foreignowned U.S. affiliates was conducted at the International Investment Division, Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce under arrangements that maintain legal confidentiality requirements. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Thanks to Alison Christians,

In part as a response to litigation brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and in part because of review of redistricting plans pursuant to Section 5 of the VRA, creating majority-minority districts has become the standard method for securing minority representation in legislative institutions. 2 Creation of such districts increased markedly after the 1990 census. 3 Most scholars would agree that the establishment of these districts was remarkably successful at securing descriptive representation, i.e., the representation of citizens of a racial or ethnic group by a co-ethnic. These districts generally did result in the election of an increasing number of African Americans and Latinos to public office.

Abstract While a great deal of research has focused on understanding the foundations of public support for American courts, scant attention has been paid to the role of the media for such attitudes. Given the media’s demonstrated ability to influence public opinion, this remains a substantial gap in the literature. In the present paper we examine how different types of media—sensationalist (i.e., political radio and cable news) or sober (i.e., newspapers and network news) — influence individuals ’ attitudes toward both the U.S. Supreme Court and courts at the state level. In line with our predictions, we find that sensationalist media exposure depresses both diffuse and specific support for American courts. Additionally, our results call into question the unconditional nature of the ubiquitous sophistication-approval relationship. We find that sophistication’s positive effect on court attitudes is conditional on an individual’s particular source of political information.

Many believe that citizenship education is core to maintaining democratic practices and a strong civil society. As such, it is an important topic to academic researchers and policy makers. Recent research has examined the extent to which voucher-supported private schools may provide superior civic skills and knowledge to their public counterparts. We extend this research to include an important class of schools—charter schools, using original survey data of students and parents in the Washington, D.C. public school system. We find that students in charter schools report a higher amount of community participation and training in civic skills, but have about the same political tolerance as their traditional public school counterparts. 2

The result is that Juve and Milan can often rig the system to assign themselves the most mediocre, provincially minded referees, who are (subconsciously) more deferential towards their prestige clubs. [...] Other referees who have issued critical penalties against Juve have found themselves working games in the lowly Serie B. [...] Only on a few occasions have some

This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support and assistance of many individuals and funding agencies. At the University of Toronto, Joe Fletcher got me started on this path with inspired teaching and encouragment. Early in my career at Michigan, Don Herzog and Chris Achen provided friendly examples of great scholarship. When they graciously bowed out of the dissertation work, John Jackson took up the challenge of providing structure, discipline, and coherence to my chaotic musings on the subject of place and Canadian electoral behaviour. I owe my greatest academic debt to his good judgment and timely interventions. Richard Johnston of the University of British Columbia provided a much-needed Canadian perspective on this work, and has been a source of support and encouragement since our first meeting in my first semester at Michigan. Fellow graduate students at Michigan were equally vital to my perseverence in this process. I am indebted to Jennifer Shulman, Russ Mayer, Scott Allard, Adam Berinsky, Nick Winter, Kevin Clarke, Sam Durrant, David Cuthbert, FC Watson Hall and many others for their companionship and willingness to commiserate

comments on an earlier draft. I’m indebted to Joseph Gochal, Sarah Matthews, and Stephanie

In both established and emerging democracies alike, the quest for public support has spurred the revival of interest in devices of direct democracy. Paramount among these devices are referenda employed to decide major questions of public policy, regime-level change, and supra-national governance. The use of referenda for these purposes challenges political scientists, long accustomed to studying the determinants of electoral choice, to develop and test models of referendum voting behavior. 1 To date, however, there has been a tendency to treat referenda as idiosyncratic events, and to model forces driving referendum voting in an ad hoc fashion. In this note, we suggest ways to improve the specification of such models. Our argument recognizes that important referenda occur in political contexts where opposing groups of party leaders conduct highly publicized campaigns for and against the proposal at issue. The prominent roles played by these partisan political figures and the parties that they lead cause referenda to assume a number of the characteristics of national or state provincial)-level elections. Specifically, we contend that, faced with uncertainty about the consequences of alternative referendum outcomes, voters use information about the principal advocates of the "yes " and "no " sides as convenient heuristic devices to facilitate their decision-making processes. As a result, assessments of an incumbent government's performance in office, party leader images, and party identification, which do much to explain voting in elections, have statistically significant and substantively important effects on referendum balloting. As an initial step in developing and testing a model based on this argument, we critique the results of a study of voting in a crucial referendum (the October 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum) published

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This paper uses three years of individual-level data to analyze the determinants of individual preferences over trade and immigration policies in the United States. Different economic models make contrasting predictions about what forces should shape these preferences. We have four main empirical results. First, we find that factor type dominates industry of employment in explaining support for trade barriers This result is consistent with a Heckscher-Ohlin model of the United States in which the country is well endowed with skilled labor relative to the rest of the world. Second, we find that home ownership also matters for individuals ' trade-policy preferences. Independent of factor type, home ownership in counties with a manufacturing mix concentrated in comparative-disadvantage industries is strongly correlated with support for trade barriers. This finding suggests that in addition to current factor incomes driving preferences as in standard trade models, in reality preferences also depend on asset values. Third, less-skilled workers are significantly more likely to prefer limiting immigrant inflows into the United States. This result suggests that over time horizons relevant to individuals when evaluating immigration policy, individuals think that the U.S. economy absorbs immigrant inflows at least partly by changing wages. These preferences are consistent with a "multi-cone " Heckscher Ohlin trade model and with a factor-proportions-analysis labor model. Fourth, we find no evidence that less-skilled