Polarization and Government Debt

Mickael Melki and Andrew Pickering

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: When voters discount the future there is pressure on governments to increase debt. Governments are more able to resist this temptation if voters are polarized ideologically. Policy contrasts starkly with models of ‘strategic debt’ wherein debt is predicted to increase with polarization. Using time-varying polarization measures generated from ideology data from party manifestos we …find a sizable and statistically significant negative association between ideological polarization and debt levels in OECD countries.

Keywords: Public Debt; Ideological Polarization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.york.ac.uk/media/economics/documents/discussionpapers/2014/1410.pdf Main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:yor:yorken:14/10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of York Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Paul Hodgson ().