quences of government partisanship. major problem facing researchers who study the consequences of government partisanship is that it is difficult to ascertain the potential economic impact of governments which, because of election defeats, never existed. Consider, for instance, a Labour government in Britain in 1992, a Conservative government in 1997, or a Dole Administration in the United States. None of these governments actually took office, and, for obvious reasons, this impedes analysis of what effects they would have had on their respective national economies. Here, I present a methodology designed to estimate the economic impact that an election-losing party would have caused had it achieved office. I focus in particular on the 1992 British polity and demonstrate that campaign-period prices of London-based, publicly traded securities can be used to estimate what was expected to have happened in the British economy conditional on a 1992 Labour victory. The estimates show that a Labour government in 1992 was expected by British investors to have ushered in significantly higher interest rates and depressed stock markets compared to those witnessed under the victorious Conservative Party. These results imply that the Labour-Conservative disparity in 1992 was substantial and that, relative to the Conservative Party, Labour was truly left-wing. Prices of market-traded securities, ostensibly nonpolitical variables, can convey a great deal about political parties, electoral competition, and the consequences of government partisanship. Suppose, for example, that prices in London stock markets were unusually volatile during the 1992 British election campaign and that they jumped dramatically following polling day and the Conservative victory. According to the analytical ap-