. We find that in election years with fiscal rules in place, public consumption is reduced by 1.6 percentage point of GDP … as compared to election years without these rules. This impact is equivalent to a reduction by a third of the volatility …

results of the system GMM revealed that the fiscal deficit is significantly large in election years and the deficit spending … spills into the year after the election, though not as high as in the election year. We could not, however, find a … significant effect in the pre-election year. In addition, we found evidence suggesting that though democracy significantly lowers …

. We find that in election years with fiscal rules in place, public consumption is reduced by 1.6 percentage point of GDP … as compared to election years without these rules. This impact is equivalent to a reduction by a third of the volatility …

We examine whether fiscal rules constrain incumbent governments to use fiscal policy for re-election purposes. Using …