Despite the growing public debate on fiscal surprise during election periods in jurisdictions where the democratic … study provides evidence from the dynamic system GMM and the ordinry least squares estimators to show that- (1) election … servicing commitments even in election periods. Policy recommendations are provided in line with the growing levels of debt …

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 …