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Voting on the Budget Deficit
Open accessAbstract
This paper analyzes a model in which different rational individuals vote over the composition and time profile of public spending.Potential disagreement between current and future majorities generates instability in the social choice function that aggregates individual preferences.In equilibrium a majority of the voters may favor a budget deficit.The size of the deficit under majority rule tends to be larger the greater is the polarization between current and potential future majorities.The paper also shows that the ex-ante efficient equilibrium of this model involves a balanced budget.A balanced budget amendment, however, is not durable under majority rule.
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Cited by
Political and Monetary Institutions and Public Financial Policies in the Industrial Countries
Grilli, V., Masciandaro, D., Tabellini, G., Malinvaud, E., & Pagano, M. (1991) · Economic Policy · doi:10.2307/1344630 · Cited by 1,585
Self-citationDivided Government, Fiscal Institutions, and Budget Deficits: Evidence from the States
Alt, J. E., & Lowry, R. C. (1994) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.2307/2082709 · Cited by 932
On the Form of Transfers to Special Interests
Coate, S., & Morris, S. (1995) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/601449 · Cited by 593
Political institutions and policy choices: evidence from the United States
Besley, T. (2002) · Working Paper Series · doi:10.1920/wp.ifs.2002.0213 · Cited by 577
Tied to the mast? National fiscal rules in the European Union
Debrun, X., Moulin, L., Turrini, A., Ayuso-i-Casals, J., & Kumar, M. S. (2008) · Economic Policy · doi:10.1111/j.1468-0327.2008.00199.x · Cited by 477
Metadata
- Authors
- Alesina, A., & Tabellini, G.
- Venue
- National Bureau of Economic Research
- Publisher
- National Bureau of Economic Research
- Published
- 1988-11
- OpenAlex
- W2979402405
- Cited by
- 511
- References
- 0
- Type
- report
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Voting on the Budget Deficit. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.3386/w2759
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- Alesina, A., & Tabellini, G. (1988). Voting on the Budget Deficit. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w2759
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
