Fiscal Policy, Government Polarization, and the Economic Literacy of Voters

Samuele Murtinu, Giulio Piccirilli () and Agnese Sacchi
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Giulio Piccirilli: Universitas Mercatorum

Working papers from Società Italiana di Economia Pubblica

Abstract: We model a two-parties electoral game in an environment where voters are imperfectly informed on the administrative ability of each party. In equilibrium, parties try to manipulate voters’ beliefs and implement fiscal policies that are looser than the social optimum. The size of this deviation from optimality increases with the incentive of parties to manipulate, the voters’ information disadvantage, and the interaction between these two elements. We test our theoretical predictions on a sample of 23 OECD countries over the period 1999–2008. We measure the incentive to manipulate voters’ beliefs through the ideological cohesion of the cabinet (i.e. government polarization), and the scope to manipulate such beliefs through the level of voters’ economic literacy. We find that polarized governments tend to worsen fiscal balances, and this is more likely in countries where the voters’ economic literacy is low. However, such tendency vanishes as literacy increases, suggesting that polarization leads to biased fiscal policies only when there is enough room for manipulation. Our results remain stable after controlling for potentially confounding differences across countries and over time – such as individuals’ education attainments, electoral and institutional systems, voter turnout –, several types of falsification tests, time dynamics and unobserved heterogeneity.

Keywords: budget balance; government polarization; electoral game; economic literacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 E62 H62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mac and nep-pol
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Working Paper: Fiscal Policy, Government Polarization, and the Economic Literacy of Voters (2016)
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