Political Competition and the Political Budget Cycle in Canada, 1870-2000: a search across alternative fiscal transmission mechanisms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper we use Engel-Granger cointegration and error correction methodology to combine I(1) economic variables with I(0) political variables to test the hypothesis that Canadian federal fiscal instruments have been influenced by overtly political factors (elections, party affiliation, minority government etc.)-the hypothesis that there is a “political budget cycle” in Canadian annual data spanning1870-2000. One reason for believing that such a cycle might exist is the belief both within and outside of politics that political parties have an incentive to manipulate economic outcomes for electoral purposes and so produce a political business cycle. Hence to motivate our work on fiscal instruments, we first ask whether there is any evidence consistent with the predictions of either partisan or opportunistic political theories in Canadian macro data. The finding that there is tentative support for a partisan cycle in real output growth then leads us to consider whether such a cycle could have been transmitted through fiscal policy. Our findings with respect to three fiscal instruments, expenditure, taxation and the overall deficit, give little support to any current political theory of the cycle but do provide support for the hypothesis that the degree of political competition matters in explaining policy time series processes both with respect to long run government size and to shorter run variations in expenditure, taxation and the overall deficit about that long run size. Thus while our findings concur with absence of any significant cyclical connection between fiscal instruments and economic outcomes, as pointed out earlier by Serletis and Afxentiou (1998), our results highlight a different channel by which politics seem to influence economic policy. As such they reinforce the more detailed findings presented earlier by Ferris, Park and Winer (2005) on the role of political competition strictly with respect to the evolution of government size in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".