Partisan Preferences and Political Institutions : Explaining Fiscal Retrenchment Decisions in the European Union

This paper endeavours to illuminate the political and institutional factors that can help explain differing degrees of fiscal retrenchment in European Union countries for the time period 1990-2001. Several variants of the partisan approach and the veto players framework are elucidated and applied to the question of budgetary consolidation. These elaborations yield five working hypotheses which are empirically tested using a time-series cross-section data set of 14 EU countries. The results lend support to the notion that partisan preferences and institutional veto players interact to shape budgetary retrenchment in a rather counterintuitive way