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Younger Parties, Bigger Spenders? Party Age and Political Budget Cycles (Center for Institutional Studies Research Seminar and The HSE/NES seminar on political economy)

Speaker: Philip Keefer (Lead Economist, Development Research Group, The World Bank)

Speaker: Philip Keefer (Lead Economist, Development Research Group, The World Bank)

March 13, Thursday, st. Shabolovka 26-4, room 4322, 18.15. 

We identify a new explanation for political budget cycles (PBCs):  politicians have stronger incentives to increase spending around elections in the presence of younger political parties.  Previous research suggests that PBCs should be larger when voters are uninformed about politician characteristics and politicians are less credible.  Research on political parties suggests that parties with particular organizational features attenuate problems of both information and credible commitment.  Older parties are more likely to have these features.  The effects of party age are robust to controls for numerous other political characteristics of countries.  In particular, the arguments and evidence here illuminate a mechanism underlying recent robust findings that PBCs are larger in younger democracies:  party age fully accounts for these effects.


Working paper: download