Lowery, David and William Berry. “The Growth of Government in the United States: An Empirical Assessment of Competing Explanations.” American Journal of Political Science, 27 (November 1983): 665-94.

Many studies have pointed to a common post-World War II trend in the scope of government activity among Western industrialized nations: government spending as a percentage of total national output has increased
substantially during this period. Numerous explanations of this phenomenon have been suggested; however, they have not been tested or have been tested inappropriately. To resolve this problem, we extract nine explanations from the literature and test them by econometric analysis of U.S. government expenditures from 1948 to 1979. Through these tests, we hope to provide a fair way to evaluate simple explanations of government growth using the same level of analysis, the same period of analysis, and the same estimation procedures. Surprisingly, little support is found for any of the extant explanations of government growth. The empirical findings are incorporated into a discussion on how to theoretically specify a more complex and conceptually satisfying model of government growth.