Conventional wisdom holds that voters punish governments that implement fiscal austerity. Yet, most empirical studies, which rely on ex-post yearly austerity measures, do not find supportive evidence. This paper revisits the issue using action-based, real-time, ex-ante measures of fiscal...

This paper extends the spatial theory of voting to an institutional structure in which policy choices are a function of the composition of the legislature and of the executive. In an institutional setup in which the policy outcome depends upon relative plurality, each voter has incentives to be...

This paper revisits the conventional but unproven wisdom that voters penalize governments for adopting fiscal austerity in a sample of advanced economies. We consider the composition of the austerity package and the economic manifesto of the implementing government and find that austerity...