With a Little Help from My Friends: Ministerial Alignment and Public Spending Composition in Parliamentary Democracies. LEQS Paper No. 133/2018 April 2018

The determinants of public spending composition have been studied from three broad perspectives in the scholarly literature: functional economic pressures, institutional constraints and party-political determinants. This paper engages with the third perspective by placing intra-governmental dynamics in the center of the analysis. Building on the portfolio allocation approach in the coalition formation literature and the common pool perspective in public budgeting, I argue that spending ministers with party-political backing from the Finance Minister or the Prime Minister are in a privileged positon to obtain extra funding for their policy jurisdictions compared to their colleagues without such support or without any partisan affiliation (non-partisan ministers). I test these propositions via a system of equations on six spending categories using seemingly unrelated regressions on a panel of 32 parliamentary democracies over two decades and offer largely supportive empirical evidence. With the exception of education, I provide evidence that budget shares accruing to key spending departments reflect this party-political logic of spending outcomes. In addition to the econometric results, I also illustrate the impact of ministerial alignment by short qualitative accounts from selected country cases

Is this the end of the populist surge?

Following the UK’s Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election as U.S. President, 2017 was billed as a year in which mainstream parties in the Netherlands, France and Germany could be overtaken by populist challengers in the shape of Geert Wilders’ PVV, Marine Le Pen’s Front National, and the AfD in Germany. Abel Bojar asks whether the PVV’s failure in the Netherlands and Macron’s victory in France signals the end of this populist trend

Hungary in 2017: could the left and far-right unite to keep Orban out of power?

Hungary is due to hold its next parliamentary election in early-2018, with this year likely to see a progressive build-up of political activity prior to the start of the campaign. Abel Bojar previews what 2017 could have in store for the country’s political parties, noting that the government’s record on cronyism and corruption may well be the most serious threat to Viktor Orban’s hold over power

How academia should respond to Europe’s refugee crisis

What role do academics have in contributing to the debate over Europe’s refugee crisis? Abel Bojar writes that the crisis comes as close to a ‘natural experiment’ as it gets in the social sciences and highlights the members of four particular research disciplines – economists, political economists/political scientists, scholars of electoral and party politics, and experts in international relations and EU studies – that should rise to the opportunity

Orbanism at its limits? Hungary’s referendum has exposed the first cracks in Viktor Orban’s rule

On 2 October, Hungary held a referendum on whether it would accept proposed EU quotas for the resettlement of refugees. Around 98 per cent of voters who participated in the referendum rejected the quotas, but the turnout fell below the 50 per cent threshold required for referendums to be valid. Abel Bojar suggests the result constitutes one of the first cracks in Hungary’s semi-authoritarian regime, whose powerful get-out-the-vote machinery failed to produce the required level of support. He argues that Viktor Orban’s success has been built on four distinct types of control, and that his control over at least one of these areas – the political arena – may now be slipping away

In defence of polls: A few high-profile misses should not overshadow the many times pollsters called it right

Polling companies were heavily criticised for failing to predict the results of the UK’s EU referendum and Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, but is this criticism fair? Abel Bojar draws on evidence from recent European elections to illustrate that opinion polls have a far better record of success than they’re given credit for

Biting the Hand that Feeds: Reconsidering Partisanship in an Age of Permanent Austerity. LEQS Discussion Paper No. 91/2015 April 2015

The New Politics of the welfare state suggests that periods of welfare retrenchment present policy-makers with a qualitatively different set of challenges and electoral incentives compared to periods of welfare expansion. An unresolved puzzle for this literature is the relative electoral success of retrenching governments in recent decades, as evidenced by various studies on fiscal consolidations. This article points to the importance of partisan biases as the main explanatory factor. I argue that partisan biases in the electorate create incentives for incumbent governments to depart from their representative function and push the burden of retrenchment on the very constituencies that they owe their electoral mandate to (”Nixon-goes-to-China”). After offering a simple model on the logic of partisan biases, the article proceeds by testing the unexpected partisan hypotheses that the model generates. My findings from a cross-section-time-series analysis in a set of 25 OECD countries provide corrobarative evidence on this Nixon-goes-to-China logic of welfare retrenchment: governments systematically inflict pain on their core constituencies. Some of the losses that the core constituencies suffer during austerity, however, are recouped during fiscal expansions when traditional partisan patterns take hold

The Electoral Advantage of the Left in Times of Fiscal Adjustment. LEQS Discussion Paper No. 103/2016 January 2016

Despite widely held views on fiscal adjustment as a political minefield for incumbents, the empirical literature on the issue has been surprisingly inconclusive. A crucial variable that has been often overlooked in the debate is partisan politics. Building on the micro-logic of Albert Hirschman’s “exit, voice and loyalty” framework, this article offers a novel theoretical perspective on the conditioning impact of partisanship in the electoral arena. Due to their more limited exit options at their disposal, left-wing voters are less likely to inflict electoral punishment on their parties, offering the latter an electoral advantage over their right-wing rivals. Relying on the largest cross-national dataset to date on the evolution of close to 100 parties’ popularity rating in 21 democracies, time-series-cross-section results confirm this electoral advantage

Public budgeting and electoral dynamics after the golden age: essays on political budget cycles, electoral behaviour and welfare retrenchment in hard times.

Political fragmentation has been widely recognized by political economists as an important cause for fiscal profligacy in democratic market economies because of the common pool nature of fiscal resources. These redictions, however, sit uneasily with the notion of governmental veto players’ ability to block each other’s spending plans for electoral purposes. Applying the logic of a bargaining-game between veto players in a political budget cycle framework, I first model that multiple players in the budget game are in fact likely to moderate pre-electoral budget outcomes. Empirical results from a cross-section time-series analysis in EU member states provide corroborative evidence that fiscal electioneering is indeed more prevalent among cohesive, single party settings. The findings are robust to alternative identification of elections, fiscal changes and sample selection

Policymaking in the EU under crisis conditions : Covid and refugee crises compared

Published online: 20 June 2023We study how crises situations shape the political decision-making structure of the EU and the responses adopted by European policy makers by comparing EU decision-making in the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis (March 2020-July 2020) and in the refugee crisis (2015 to 2019), based on a new data-set on policymaking. Similarities between the two crises include: comparable polarization and conflict intensity, executive dominance, a greater role of EU institutions in policy domains where the EU has higher competence, more conflict and greater resistance by coalitions of member states in domains where it has lower competence, and minority coalitions of critical member states have been crucial for possible solutions in both crises. The key difference between the two crises lies in the fact that, in the refugee crisis, the opposing coalition was able to prevent any kind of reform, while in the first wave of the Covid crisis, the opposition was more amenable to a joint solution in the crucial fiscal policy domain, where the conflict became most intense. We suggest that this key difference is ultimately rooted in the character of the original problem pressure and the different distribution of spatial incidence in the two crises.This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - Springer Transformative Agreement (2020-2024).The research on which the paper is based has been funded by the SOLID-project, ERC SYG_2018 Grant n. 810356. H2020 European Research Council