Budget Deficits and Redistributive Politics
提出新观点解释政府为何积累债务，认为赤字是政治家为争取选民支持而进行再分配的工具，即使在选民同质的环境下也会出现赤字。
This paper proposes a new view of the forces in the political process that cause governments to accumulate debt. The analysis builds on a model of redistributive politics that, contrary to median voter models, does not restrict the set of policies that politicians can propose. I show that deficits occur even in an environment where voters (and periods) are homogeneous. This is an environment where previous political theories of debt would predict budget balance. In the model deficits are a way for candidates to better target promises to voters and are therefore used as tools of redistributive politics. The main contribution of the analysis is to show that the same forces that push candidates to redistribute resources across voters to pursue political advantage are forces that generate budget deficits.