Len: well, yes, you are right that I too quickly asserted such an empirical relationship. In fact, in the only paper I've ever coauthored with my husband (in mid-1990s when you and I were working at CBO together!) we looked at "political competition" and state government size and indeed found "mixed results"--although notice that on page 13 we found that Democratic governors appeared to lead to larger government when the House was largely Democratic. So perhaps that's the "historical evidence" that's biasing my expectation of the political pressures for larger government under an Obama Administration and a Democratically-controlled Congress. (And note from the references cited in that working paper that one Doug Holtz-Eakin is listed...) Here is a description of the final version we published in a 2000 issue of Public Choice: http://www.springerlink.com/content/u852w85nl072k020/ Note that the abstract for the final published version asserts the "big government" tendencies of Democratically-controlled governments a little more strongly.