Abstract
In this paper we analyse the effect of constitutional structures over policy outcomes. In particular, we exploit the heterogeneity in parliamentary systems deriving from the presence and the use of the confidence vote to investigate whether stable and unstable parliamentary systems behave differently in terms of the policies they implement. This finer partition of parliamentary systems allows us to identify effects that are more robust than the ones previously discussed in the literature. We show that the difference between presidential and parliamentary systems documented in previous works is driven by a difference between presidential and stable parliamentary systems. We suggest that possible transmission channels are legislative cohesion and (the absence of) selection.
Highlights
Over the last decade the political economy literature has focused on the impact that political institutions have on national policies (Persson 2002) and the seminal work of Persson and Tabellini (2003) has shown that institutions, namely political regimes, do matter in shaping the size and the composition of government spending.While their partition of institutional frameworks in parliamentary and presidential is the most intuitive, it does not lead to results that are robust to changes such as, for example, the set of countries or the times span as Blume et al (2009) have highlighted.We suggest that policy decisions, and government spending among them, depend on how political actors respond to the incentives put in place by the institutional system in which they operate
We focus on the presence of the confidence vote,1 traditionally the main element of distinction between parliamentary and presidential regimes, and exploit its effective use as a way to account for the interaction between institutions and other characteristics that may influence policy implementation
We investigate more deeply the characteristics of countries that adopt a parliamentary constitution by considering the stability of the government as a proxy to distinguish different parliamentary systems (Lijphart 2004)
Summary
Over the last decade the political economy literature has focused on the impact that political institutions have on national policies (Persson 2002) and the seminal work of Persson and Tabellini (2003) has shown that institutions, namely political regimes, do matter in shaping the size and the composition of government spending.While their partition of institutional frameworks in parliamentary and presidential is the most intuitive, it does not lead to results that are robust to changes such as, for example, the set of countries or the times span as Blume et al (2009) have highlighted.We suggest that policy decisions, and government spending among them, depend on how political actors respond to the incentives put in place by the institutional system in which they operate. Over the last decade the political economy literature has focused on the impact that political institutions have on national policies (Persson 2002) and the seminal work of Persson and Tabellini (2003) has shown that institutions, namely political regimes, do matter in shaping the size and the composition of government spending. While their partition of institutional frameworks in parliamentary and presidential is the most intuitive, it does not lead to results that are robust to changes such as, for example, the set of countries or the times span as Blume et al (2009) have highlighted. The performance of parliamentary systems may depend on politicians’ characteristics such as, for example, the quality of the information available and/or the alignment of their interests with the citizens
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