Overlapping political budget cycle

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing for cycles in expenditures for elections to the legislative and the executive branches. Using municipal data, we identify cycles independently for the two branches, evaluate the effects of overlaps, and account for general year effects. We find sizable effects on expenditures before legislative elections and even larger effects before joint elections to the legislature and the office of mayor. In the case of coincident elections, we show that it is important whether the incumbent chief executive seeks reelection. To account for the potential endogeneity of that decision, we apply an IV approach using age and pension eligibility rules

Politics and possibility on the metropolitan edge: The scale of social movement space in exurbia

Both the suburbanization of poverty and the growth of suburban social movements have been the focus of much academic discussion of late, even if these two discussions are not necessarily linked. One area that has been relatively underresearched when it comes to both phenomena are exurban regions, critical spaces of change and crisis, in particular in upmarket regions like those in Northern and Southern California. This paper presents a case study of the 'social movement space' of eastern Contra Costa County, on the edge of the San Francisco Bay Area. It argues that not only did propoor, socialjustice- oriented movements arise over the past decade in response to changing geography, they exhibited a form of 'scalar promiscuity' which differs from the regionalization of social movements or other forms of 'scale jumping' well known in the literature