Knight, B. (2000), Supermajority Voting Requirements for Tax Increases

Return to BPP Field Exam Papers 2012 Median legislator, member of pro-tax majority party, may want to limit his own party median power when setting agenda. in order to force a median outcome near his bliss point, he can team up with minority party and require super-majority.

Assumption: Status quo policy is lower than median legislators bliss policy.

Research Question

Do super majority requirements have effect of lowering tax rate across states?

• if super majorities adopted where majority is pro-tax, then we might measure confounding effects.
  • higher tax-rate from majority party being pro-tax
  • lower tax rate from super majority.

Results

Both fixed effects (state/year) and IV(variation in state constitutional amendment rules) regressions show that super-majorities requirements significantly reduce tax-rate.