All autocrats rely on inner-circle elites to stay in power. It is commonly assumed that dictators will purge these elites if they unsuccessfully try to unseat the dictator in a coup. However, this assumption has never been tested in a global analysis. Furthermore, little is known about whom dictators target in such purges. This article focuses on the highest levels of the regime, namely cabinet ministers. Using a new global dataset, our analysis covers over 23,000 cabinet members in 115 autocracies from 1967 to 2016. We demonstrate that failed coups induce autocrats to increasingly purge their cabinets, and that they do so selectively by targeting higher-ranking cabinet members and those who hold strategic positions, while keeping more loyal and veteran ministers in post. The article presents the most detailed individual-level evidence to date on purges and offers key insights into power-sharing mechanisms in autocracies.

Privatization varies considerably among local governments. One of the oft-listed explanations is the ability of public employees to block privatization. However, many studies on the influence of public employees on privatization do not use very precise measures of the influence of public employees, they have been unable to isolate a one-way effect, and the studies have not been attentive to whether the effect varies for different market forms. In this article, we focus on privatization in Denmark through a voucher market without price competition for eldercare services. Using new data for all 98 Danish municipalities in 2012, we are able to measure the strength of the public eldercare union as well as the number of the public eldercare workers relative to the number of local voters. We find that the increased union strength measured in terms of union density at the municipal level leads to substantially and significantly less privatization through the voucher market. By comparison, the estimated relationship between the relative number of public workers and privatization does not reach statistical significance. Features of the voucher market and qualitative evidence suggest that the union influence primarily goes through a direct user channel, that is through union influence directed at the service users, while a minor effect possibly runs through a political channel, that is lobbying directed at the local politicians.

Incumbent incentive for competence-signaling and lack of voter information are generally thought to be factors that increase the prevalence of political budget cycles. These mechanisms should be more prevalent in new political units. Since the creation of new political units is rarely exogenous, however, serious endogeneity issues would be an issue for empirical studies of this subject. To overcome these problems, I use a Danish local government reform-which amalgamated some (but not all) Danish municipalities, thereby creating new political units-in a way that is arguably quasiexperimental to study whether political budget cycles are larger in new political units. Contrary to theoretical predictions, political budget cycles seem to be of a smaller scale in the new municipalities, but only regarding budget cycles in budgetary overruns. The findings are of wider interest for discussions the mechanisms behind context-conditional political budget cycles.

A simple formal model of government tax-setting is presented below. It is loosely based on a simplified version of the budget process model developed by Hallerberg et al. (2009, pp. 25-31). General setupA government sets a tax level t 1 on a number of constituencies, each of which are denoted by i.These constituencies can be thought of in terms of geography or social groups. Intuitively, different tax instruments affect different geographical areas and/or social groups differently; consumption taxes affect low-income households more than high-income households, as the former consume a large fraction of their income, whereas an increase in a progressive income tax affects high-income households more than low-income households. However, tax avoidance possibly also reduces the revenue from each constituency tax. Tax avoidance increases with the number of constituencies.

The political budget cycle—how elections affect government fiscal policy—is one of the most studied subjects in political economy and political science. The key theoretical question is whether incumbent governments can time or structure public finances in ways that improve their chances of reelection; the key empirical question is whether this in fact happens. The incentives of incumbents to engage in such electioneering are governed by political institutions, observability of political choices, and their consequences, as well as voter knowledge, and both theoretical and empirical studies on political budget cycles have recently focused on conditions under which such cycles are likely to obtain. Much recent research focuses on subnational settings, allowing comparisons of governments in similar institutional environments, and a consensus on the presences of cycles in public finances—and in the reporting of public finances—is beginning to emerge.