Political Institutions and Policy Outcomes: What are the Stylized Facts?

By Torsten Persson, Guido Tabellini. Social Science Research Network, 2001

202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the effect of electoral rules and political regimes on fiscal policy outcomes in a sample of democracies, exploiting both cross country and time series variation in the data. Presidential regimes lead to smaller governments, while majoritarian elections lead to smaller governments and smaller welfare programs. Different constitutions are also associated with different spending patterns over time and different cyclical response to income shocks. Some of these empirical regularities are in line with recent theoretical work; others still await a theoretical explanation.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba3014a6683362f83992bd70f198fcf26d423054

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In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

Privatisation Around the World: New Evidence from Panel Data (2001, unknown): “Banks et al. (1997), Wilfried Derksen s Electoral Web Sites (www.agora.stm.it/elections), Persson and Tabellini (2001) FRENCH LAW Dummy variable taking value 1 for French civil law countries, and 0 otherwise.”
The Political Economy of Privatization (2003, unknown): “Persson and Tabellini (2001) provide evidence that the majoritarian electoral rules lead to lower government spending and lower welfare programs.”
Exchange Rates and Cohesion: Historical Perspectives and Political-Economy Considerations (2003, unknown): “1 See Rose (2000) and Frankel and Rose (2002).”
The Case for Restricting Fiscal Policy Discretion (2003, methodology): “Indeed, a still-growing empirical and theoretical literature summarized by Drazen (2000), Persson (2001), and Persson and Tabellini (2001) explores how policy is shaped by the characteristics of the electoral and political systems.”
Current Account Balances, Financial Development and Institutions: Assaying the World "Savings Glut" (2007, unknown): “The rationale for using these instruments follows the past literature on the determinants of budget balances such as Roubini (1991), Roubini and Sachs (1989a, b), Persson and Tabellini (2001), and Braconier and Holden (2004).”
The Macroeconomic Effects of Fiscal Rules in the US States (2006, unknown): “Following ACIR (1987) and Bohn and Inman (1996) we characterize balanced budget restrictions according to the different phases of the budget process that they refer to as well as their strictness.”
Fiscal policy responsiveness, persistence, and discretion (2010, unknown): “In particular, while Persson (2001) and Persson and Tabellini (2001) ﬁnd that, in general, parliamentary and majority based systems are re-lated to cyclicality of ﬁscal policy, Alesina et al. (2008) found that most of the pro-cyclicality of ﬁscal policy in developing countries can be explained by…”
Fiscal Transparency and Economic Outcomes (2005, background): “_____, Guido Tabellini, and F. Trebbi, 2000, “Electoral Rules and Corruption,” (unpublished; Stockholm: Institute for International Economic Studies).”
Do Electoral Cycles Differ Across Political Systems (2003, methodology): “Persson and Tabellini (2001) and Milesi-Ferretti, Perotti and Rostagno (2002) find empirical support for this prediction, showing that social transfers are higher in countries with proportional electoral rules.”