.e., “lame ducks”) cannot be held accountable due to the missing re-election incentives. By dividing government control voters …Divided government is not only the outcome of moderate voters’ electoral decision to balance party ideology in … government, but a more general reaction of voters to a systematic control problem. Voters realize that term limited executives (i …

We investigate empirically how party ideology influences size and scope of government as measured by the size of … government, tax structure and labor market regulation. Our dataset comprises 49 US states over the 1993-2009 period. We employ … differences in Democratic and Republican Party ideology. We distinguish between three types of divided government: overall divided …

Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided … government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data … regressions show that under divided government a US state is around 25% more likely to adopt a welfare reform than under unified …

their re-election. This paper investigates the impact of electoral manipulation of the level and composition of fiscal … policy on incumbent’s re-election prospects. This impact is estimated for a panel of 21 OECD countries over the period 1972 … towards public investment can improve re-election prospects. On the contrary, election year manipulation via public investment …

evidence for an electoral cycle for government deficit and expenditures, we do find a negative effect of elections on revenue …. Our results indicate that the fall in revenue in election periods is attributed to a fall in direct taxation. The …

We use real]time annual data on the fiscal balance, government current spending, current revenues and net capital … data are not affected by elections. However, we do find that governments spend more than reported before an election which … enhance his perceived competence. We also find that governments had higher current receipts than reported before an election …

evaluate the performance of local government in the provision of local public services. The model employs a reduced set of …

France has a track record of persistent general government deficits, partly reflecting pro-cyclical fiscal policies in … general government surpluses, which is very ambitious in view of French fiscal history since 1970. The government …’s consolidation programme, which is aimed at reducing the general government deficit to 3% of GDP by 2013, represents around two …

A country’s form of government has important economic and political consequences, but the determinants that lead … proceeds in two steps. First, we identify the survival probability of the existing form of government (drawing on a …