Title: Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Redistribution
Abstract: Why is public spending considerably lower in presidential than in parliamentary democracies? This paper proposes and tests a new argument to explain dierences in scal policies between presidential and parliamentary democracies. In contrast to the conventional political economy explanation based on rent-seeking politicians, I argue that executive-legislative institutions matter for taxes and transfers because they shape who gets what in partisan conict over redistribution. The model I develop highlights that executive-institutions inuence redistributive policy by shaping the distribution and eectiveness of partisan governments. Accordingly, redistribution is lower in presidential than in parliamentary democracies because the separation of executive and legislative power under presidentialism reduces the frequency and bargaining power of left governments. I test implications of this argument using cross-sectional and panel data covering a large set of democracies. As predicted by the model, the estimation results indicate that the occurrence of left governments accounts for a signicant portion of the cross-sectional variation in public spending and that the scal eects of changes in government partisanship are stronger in parliamentary than in presidential democracies. Taken together, the results imply that one important reason for why we observe lower taxes and transfers in presidential than parliamentary democracies is because presidentialism advantages partisan interests in favor of low redistribution, not because it is better at controlling rent-seeking politicians.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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