Political Cycles in Public Expenditure: Butter vs Guns

Vincenzo Bove and Georgios Efthyvoulou

No 7/2013, NEPS Working Papers from Network of European Peace Scientists

Abstract: This paper investigates how the timing of elections and government ideological motivations influence the dynamics of social and military expenditure in a panel of 22 OECD countries over the period 1988-2008. Three basic results emerge: First, governments tend to bias outlays towards social expenditure and away from military expenditure at election times. Second, membership in the NATO alliance affects the timing of election-driven military spending manipulations. Third, partisan distinctions are clearly discernible but differ between the two types of expenditure: while certain categories of social expenditure are higher during left administrations, military expenditure are higher during right administrations.

Keywords: elections; partisanship; social expenditure; military expenditure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 D72 H53 H56 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2013-10-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.europeanpeacescientists.org/7_2013.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.europeanpeacescientists.org/7_2013.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.europeanpeacescientists.org/7_2013.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Political cycles in public expenditure: butter vs guns (2017)
Working Paper: Political Cycles in Public Expenditure: Butter vs Guns (2013)
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:ris:nepswp:2013_007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NEPS Working Papers from Network of European Peace Scientists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vincenzo Bove ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).