Rent-Seeking Mediation Inferences in Partisan-Politics/Fiscal Restraints Triangulation

Guided by both dynamic theory of public spending, taxation, and debt and the pure theory of local expenditure, this research critically examines the fiscal restraints mechanism and its pertinent predictors in local government. While partisan-politics was surveyed for its conventionally-claimed antecedent influences in the restraints set-up, rent-seeking was tested for apparent mediation in the partisan-politics/fiscal restraints linkages. Relevant data were collected from 23 districts, 3 cities, 5 municipalities and 240 sub-counties located in West Nile and Northern regions of Uganda. The East African nation has for long been an empirical focus of fiscal-federalism/partisan-politics/ rent-seeking complexities. Results from multiple regression-structural equation modeling-bootstrapping statistical techniques employed in analyzing proposed hypotheses reveal: two partisan-politics constructs; open elections and party cooperation, predict entity fiscal restraints direction. While its other attribute, voter sensitization, does not hold such explanatory capacity, rent-seeking practices mediate the partisan- politics/fiscal restraints connections