IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v112y2018i04p939-953_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Cabinet Durability and Fiscal Discipline

Author

Listed:
  • FORTUNATO, DAVID
  • LOFTIS, MATT W.

Abstract

We argue that short government durations in parliamentary democracies increase public spending by driving a political budget cycle. We present a revision of the standard political budget cycle model that relaxes the common (often implicit) assumption that election timing is fixed and known in advance. Instead, we allow cabinets to form expectations about their durability and use these expectations to inform their spending choices. The model predicts that (1) cabinets should spend more as their expected term in office draws to a close and (2) cabinets that outlive their expected duration should run higher deficits. Using data from 15 European democracies over several decades, we show that governments increase spending as their expected duration withers and run higher deficits as they surpass their forecasted life expectancy.

Suggested Citation

  • Fortunato, David & Loftis, Matt W., 2018. "Cabinet Durability and Fiscal Discipline," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 112(4), pages 939-953, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:112:y:2018:i:04:p:939-953_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055418000436/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aizenman, Joshua & Jinjarak, Yothin & Spiegel, Mark M., 2023. "Fiscal capacity and commercial bank lending under COVID-19," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    2. Noell Machinjike & Wellington G. Bonga, 2021. "Fiscal Discipline and Budget Processes: Evidence from Zimbabwe," International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS), vol. 5(2), pages 607-616, February.
    3. Joshua Aizenman & Yothin Jinjarak & Mark M. Spiegel, 2022. "Fiscal Stimulus and Commercial Bank Lending Under COVID-19," Working Paper Series 2022-04, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:112:y:2018:i:04:p:939-953_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.