Surges and cuts are explained here by some of the political factors affecting governments' abilities to balance the budget broadly discussed in the literature. We focus on territorial separatism, minority government, grand coalition, single-party government, and the ruling party's ideology....

The link between an introduction of the universal suffrage and the growth of government spending has been established in some literature (Meltzer, Richard, 1981, Aidt et al., 2006, Funk and Guthmann, 2006). In this article we try to identify a more detailed mechanism behind that link. So, we...

The voter - bureaucrat is locked into a situation of a conflict of interests: as a conscientious citizen, he or she should support optimal expenditure levels for providing certain public goods, but as a person whose wellbeing and career depend on the volume of expenditures for providing public...