Essays on democratization and taxation

This dissertation contains three chapters on political economy. Chapter 2 develops a game-theoretic model of democratization while chapter 3 studies women's suffrage in the United States empirically. Chapter 4 is a theoretical chapter exploring taxation with endogenous income. In chapter 2, I propose a political-economic model of democratization. In this model, part of the electorate wants extension because this makes their favorite outcome in future, more achievable. And to increase their current probabilities of winning, parties propose extension, even if that means moving away from their favorite platforms in future. Here extension of franchise occurs under the following circumstances: an almost even distribution of partisans in the population, large rents from office and a particular party enjoying some partisan advantage among the voters. The mechanism does not explicitly incorporate redistributive aspects of franchise extension and hence is a more plausible model for instances of enfranchisement where redistributive repercussions may not have been a potent consideration, like women's suffrage. In chapter 3, I study women's suffrage in the United States empirically. Though women's suffrage was federally mandated in the United States by the nineteenth amendment in 1920, many states had granted suffrage to women prior to that and most of them were clustered in the west. I revisit some of the popular conjectures that have been put forward to explain why these states moved first to give women the vote and offer a hypothesis of partisan competition leading to suffrage extension. I find evidence that early enfranchisement of women in the western states was driven by the intensity of competition between Republicans and Democrats, as well as by adverse female-male ratios, greater concentration of the population in urban areas and by a neighboring states adoption of women's suffrage. Also, the 'risk' of suffrage enactments was increasing over time. In chapter 4, I study income taxation with endogenous income. In a voting-over-income-taxation game, there exists no pure strategy equilibrium when voters' incomes are exogenous. This is true even if the space of tax-schedules is restricted to be marginally progressive only. However in such a setting, with endogenous income, pure strategy equilibrium exists.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 157-163)by Soumyanetra Munsh