Do Parties Make a Difference? Parties and the Size of Government in Liberal Democracies

Blais, André; Blake, Donald E.; Dion, Stéphane

doi:10.2307/2111523

Cited by 305 publications

(219 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…2 For a sample of such publications, see Adams 2001;Baron 1991Baron , 1993Blais, Blake, and Dion 1993;Gabel and Huber 2000;Kim and Fording 1998;Schofield and Parks 2000;and Warwick 1994and Warwick , 2001and Warwick , 2002 generating this mammoth data set by hand over a period of more than 20 years, it is easy to see why no other research team has been willing to go behind the very distinctive theoretical assumptions that structure the CMP coding scheme or to take on the task of checking or replicating any of the data. A second approach to text analysis replaces the handcoding of texts with computerized coding schemes.…”

Section: W E Present a New Way Of Extracting Policy Positions From Pomentioning

confidence: 99%

Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data

2003

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Section: W E Present a New Way Of Extracting Policy Positions From Pomentioning

confidence: 99%

Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data

2003

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“…The question of whether political parties "matter" supports a long-standing debate in the political science and political economy literatures. A small sampling from this literature includes Winters (1976); Garand (1988); Blais, Blake and Dion (1993); Krehbiel (1993), Imbeau, Pétry and Lamari (2001); Besley and Case (2003);and Per Pettersson-Lidbom (2003). Central to this debate is the extent to which political parties deviate from the median voter in a two-party system.…”

Section: Conventional Wisdom (Or At Least Republican Campaign Propagamentioning

confidence: 99%

Democrats, republicans, and taxes: Evidence that political parties matter

Reed

2006

Journal of Public Economics

153

109

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I estimate the influence of political parties on state Tax Burdens over a forty-year period . Holding constant a large number of state and voter characteristic variables, I find that: (i) Tax Burdens are higher when Democrats control the state legislature compared to when Republicans are in control. (ii) The political party of the governor has little effect after controlling for partisan influences in the state legislature. I explain how both findings are consistent with median voter theory. My results suggest that after five years of Democratic control of the legislature, state government would be approximately 3 to 5 percent larger than if Republicans controlled the legislature during that same period, with the better specifications producing estimates in the higher end of this range.

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“…Second, left-wing political parties have preferences inclined toward greater governmental intervention in the economy. In fact, numerous studies have found a significant relationship between parties' ideological position and the government's size and economic intervention (Schmidt, 2006, Allan & Scruggs, 2004, Blais et al, 1993. Hence, this work will consider the separation of ideology into two dimensions: the social policy position and the economic policy position.…”

Section: Environmental Issues and The Leftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Environmental Taxes Affected by Legislatures` Ideological Positions?

Miller

Vela

2013

SSRN Journal

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inter-American Development Bank, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent. Terms of use: Documents inThe unauthorized commercial use of Bank documents is prohibited and may be punishable under the Bank's policies and/or applicable laws. Copyright ©Inter-American Development Bank. This working paper may be reproduced for any non-commercial purpose. It may also be reproduced in any academic journal indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, with previous consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Cataloging-in-Publication 2013 AbstractEnvironmental taxes have been discussed as one of the main mechanisms to deal with environmental problems. Nonetheless, instruments of this type have rarely been implemented, and the adoption of new or higher environmental taxes has faced resistance in some countries. The purpose of this work is to identify one possible political answer to why adoption of environmental taxes varies. One explanation is that legislatures' ideological position affects the degree of usage of taxes generally and environmental taxes in particular. For example, right-wing parties tend to be less associated with environmental concerns and more associated with lower government intervention. This paper presents evidence that reflects this relationship, showing the positive association of more left-wing legislatures with higher levels of environmental taxation. A panel of data for 37 developed and developing countries over 16 years is used considering the percentage of total revenue from environmentally related taxes, the ratio of this revenue to total energy use and tax levels in industry and household sectors. The results show that most of these impacts involve environmentally related taxes in the industry sector. Proportional representation electoral systems and high seat concentration by few parties appear to be necessary conditions for the negative relation of right-wing ideology with environmental taxes.JEL classification: H23, P16, Q58.

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Do Parties Make a Difference? Parties and the Size of Government in Liberal Democracies

Cited by 305 publications

References 52 publications

Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data

Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data

Democrats, republicans, and taxes: Evidence that political parties matter

Are Environmental Taxes Affected by Legislatures` Ideological Positions?

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