Graduation Year

Spring 2014

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

Second Department

Government

Reader 1

Eric Helland

Reader 2

Frederick Lynch

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2014 Shree Pandya

Abstract

The United States has faced a number of medical malpractice crises over the past four decades. In response to these crises, state legislatures have enacted a variety of tort reforms of varying strength. This paper seeks to explore the determinants of such reforms. This study uses a dataset composed of state tort reforms, indicators of political partisanship, healthcare campaign finance contributions, malpractice payments, and malpractice lawsuits. This paper finds that political partisanship is a key determinant of the relative strength of reforms, with Republicans likely to pass hard reforms of economic significance and Democrats likely to pass soft reforms with little impact.

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