Alberto Alesina, Gabriele Ciminelli, Davide Furceri, Giorgio Saponaro
{"title":"Austerity and elections","authors":"Alberto Alesina, Gabriele Ciminelli, Davide Furceri, Giorgio Saponaro","doi":"10.1111/ecca.12534","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>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 packages consisting mostly of tax hikes have a significant electoral cost, which is larger for government parties that campaigned on a free-market manifesto. Conversely, expenditure-based austerity is costlier for government parties that did not run on a small-government platform, but may be beneficial for those that did.</p>","PeriodicalId":48040,"journal":{"name":"Economica","volume":"91 363","pages":"1075-1099"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Economica","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecca.12534","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
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 packages consisting mostly of tax hikes have a significant electoral cost, which is larger for government parties that campaigned on a free-market manifesto. Conversely, expenditure-based austerity is costlier for government parties that did not run on a small-government platform, but may be beneficial for those that did.
期刊介绍:
Economica is an international journal devoted to research in all branches of economics. Theoretical and empirical articles are welcome from all parts of the international research community. Economica is a leading economics journal, appearing high in the published citation rankings. In addition to the main papers which make up each issue, there is an extensive review section, covering a wide range of recently published titles at all levels.