Studying the role of political competition in the evolution of government size over long horizons

J. Stephen Ferris (), Park, Soo-Bin and Stanley Winer ()

P.O.L.I.S. department's Working Papers from Department of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS

Abstract: We argue for the use of cointegration and error correction analysis as a method to combine economic factors that are nonstationary with political factors that are stationary into a dynamic, empirical model of the evolution of public policy over long periods. The approach we develop is applied to disentangle the contributions of economics and politics to the evolution of public expenditure by the Government of Canada over 130 years, from the origin of the modern state to the end of the 20th century. Political competition emerges robustly as the primary political factor affecting government size in the long run as well as over shorter horizons.

Keywords: political competition; conditional convergence; cointegration; public expenditure; size of government; politics versus economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 H1 H3 H5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-his, nep-pbe and nep-pol
Date: Written 2008-06
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http://polis.unipmn.it/pubbl/RePEc/uca/ucapdv/winer123.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Studying the Role of Political Competition in the Evolution of Government Size Over Long Horizons (2007)
Journal Article: Studying the role of political competition in the evolution of government size over long horizons (2008)
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