Premium
Partisan politics and fiscal policy in the Canadian provinces
Author(s) -
Haddow Rodney
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
canadian public administration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.361
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1754-7121
pISSN - 0008-4840
DOI - 10.1111/capa.12390
Subject(s) - optimal distinctiveness theory , politics , political economy , democracy , political science , fiscal policy , left wing politics , period (music) , economics , development economics , keynesian economics , social psychology , psychology , physics , acoustics , law
This article evaluates the impact of partisanship on provincial fiscal policies over business‐ and electoral‐cycles between 1981 and 2016. There were partisan differences between left‐wing governments (the New Democratic Party and the Parti Québécois), on the one hand, and conservative ones, on the other. The evidence is particularly strong for business‐cycles, where left‐wing parties pursued much more countercyclical strategies than conservatives. In contrast, there was little difference between most Liberal administrations and conservative ones. Left‐wing fiscal policies nevertheless lost their distinctiveness during the last third of the study period. The article concludes by discussing possible explanations for this change.