Replication data for: Electoral and Partisan Manipulation of Public Debt in Developed Democracies, 1956-1990

Empirical evaluation of political-economy theories has, however, lagged that of basic economic-conditions models. This paper joins those beginning to redress the imbalance, operationalizing and evaluating standard electoral and partisan budget-cycles arguments and their modern, rational-expectations-strategic variants.

The evidence strongly suggests modification of the former and flatly rejects the latter. Electoral budget-cycles exist, but their timing is different than usually assumed. Partisan debt-effects also exist, but they run in commonly expected directions (left-deficits, right-surpluses) only when incumbents’ perceived risk of replacement by ideological competitors is high.