TY  - JOUR
AU  - Alesina,Alberto F.
AU  - Carloni,Dorian
AU  - Lecce,Giampaolo
TI  - The Electoral Consequences of Large Fiscal Adjustments
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17655
PY  - 2011
Y2  - December 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17655
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17655.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alberto F. Alesina
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Center 210
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-8388
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: aalesina@harvard.edu

Dorian Carloni
University of California, Berkeley
E-Mail: dcarloni@econ.berkeley.edu

Giampaolo Lecce
Bocconi University 
E-Mail: gl834@nyu.edu
M1  - published as Alberto Alesina, Dorian Carloni, Giampaolo Lecce. "The Electoral Consequences of Large Fiscal Adjustments," in Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi, editors, "Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis" University of Chicago Press (2013)

AB  - The conventional wisdom regarding the political consequences of large reductions of budget deficits is that they are very costly for the governments which implement them: they are punished by voters at the following elections. In the present paper, instead, we find no evidence that governments which quickly reduce budget deficits are systematically voted out of office in a sample of 19 OECD countries from 1975 to 2008.  We also take into consideration issues of reverse causality, namely the possibility that only "strong and popular" governments can implement fiscal adjustments and thus they are not voted out of office "despite" having reduced the deficits.  In the end we conclude that many governments can reduce deficits avoiding an electoral defeat.
ER  -