Education, fake news and the Political Budget Cycle

Fabio Padovano and Pauline Mille
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Pauline Mille: University of Rennes 1, CNRS, CREM-UMR 62 11

Economics Working Paper from Condorcet Center for political Economy at CREM-CNRS from Condorcet Center for political Economy

Abstract: This paper empirically verifies whether education, an indicator of voters’ ability to process information, constrains political budget cycles (PBC), a measure of inefficiency in the agency relationship between voters and their representatives. Over information and the spread of fake news question the previous results of conditional PBC literature on information as a factor improving such relationship. We proxy the quality of education by PISA scores and the its diffusion by the percentage of students completing secondary and tertiary education. On a sample of 46 countries over the period 2000-2019, the estimates show that higher levels of education reduce the magnitude of PBC. Adding standard proxies for information (media and internet penetration) does not affect the results, showing that education matters more than information. The analysis also evidences differences between higher and lower degrees of democracy. All the other findings of the literature appear confirmed.

Keywords: Political Budget Cycles; education; information processing; fake news; democracy. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 D91 E62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
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