Shaping their own Destiny

2020 ◽  
pp. 157-183
Author(s):  
Timothy Hellwig ◽  
Yesola Kweon ◽  
Jack Vowles
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Policy Environment ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
Fiscal Austerity ◽  
Party Support ◽  
The Impact

Did the GFC and Great Recession reshape how voters choose among party policy offerings? In this chapter we show that, since 2008, electoral support for the mainstream parties on the centre-left and centre-right has waned, while challenger parties have grown. Multivariate analyses of election returns trace some of this shift in party support to the effects to the policies of austerity and to the accumulation of public debt. The ideological implications of the crisis era for support among the political mainstream are less apparent but a consideration of elite cues produces a ‘crisis effect’. This effect, however, is shaped by the policy environment. Voting for the mainstream left declines, especially in settings of fiscal austerity. Furthermore, the relative effects of these settings vary with time. Short-term fiscal efforts in the form of stimulus or austerity did much to sway voters during the shock years of 2008 and 2009. With time, however, the impact of these short-term efforts weakened. In the longer run, we find that policy rhetoric can prop up support for the left and for challengers during continued hard times.

scholarly journals Inspecting the Mechanism: Leverage and the Great Recession in the Eurozone

2017 ◽  
Vol 107 (7) ◽  
pp. 1904-1937 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Martin ◽  
Thomas Philippon
Keyword(s):  
Market Segmentation ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Fiscal Policies ◽  
Labor Costs ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Credit Cycles ◽  
Macroprudential Policies ◽  
Fiscal Austerity ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Identification Strategy

We provide a comprehensive account of the dynamics of eurozone countries from 2000 to 2012. We analyze private leverage, fiscal policy, labor costs, and spreads, and we propose a model and an identification strategy to separate the impact of credit cycles, excessive government spending, and sudden stops. We then ask how periphery countries would have fared with different policies. We find that countries could have stabilized their employment if they had followed more conservative fiscal policies during the boom. Macroprudential policies and an early intervention by the central bank to prevent market segmentation and reduce fiscal austerity would also have significantly reduced the recession. (JEL E24, E32, E58, E62, F33, F42, H61)

Social change and markets for urban credit: political elites as investors in urban annuities in sixteenth-century Ghent

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-367
Author(s):  
Jelten Y. P. Baguet
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Debt Management ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Investment Behaviour

Financial historians have devoted considerable attention to the investment behaviour of urban politicians in the market for public debt in the Low Countries. They have focused not only on how many urban officials invested in annuities, but also why they did so. On the one hand, it has been suggested that political elites often had political and economic motivations for investing in urban annuities. By contrast, historians from the institutional school defend the thesis that inclusive governance led to broader participation in the market for urban credit. A variable that has gone largely unnoticed in explaining investments by the political elite is the impact of the changing composition and social profile of the ruling elites on their investment behaviour. In this article, I examine the case of sixteenth-century Ghent to argue that changes in the city's power structure resulted in profound changes in attitudes towards public debt management. While the old political elite in the early sixteenth century prioritised selling annuities to individuals who belonged to the political networks of their time, the group of political newcomers that dominated urban politics at the end of the sixteenth century had much more of a market-oriented attitude, giving priority to non-political investors in the free market.

When the Bubble Burst: Transient and Persistent National Front Supporters, 1974–79

1984 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T. Husbands
Keyword(s):  
Research Note ◽  
The Political ◽  
Voting Behaviour ◽  
Short Term ◽  
National Front ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
Point Of Interest ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
Attitudinal Characteristics ◽  
Bubble Burst

One point of interest about the period of the Labour government from October 1974 to May 1979 is the short-term surge and subsequent decline between these dates of electoral support for the National Front (NF). This episode of NF voting raises a number of questions. Some of these are simple empirical ones. What, for example, were the political origins, in terms of voting behaviour in the October 1974 general election, of this body of NF voters? What were their political destinations in May 1979? What characterized the various groups of voters who between 1974 and 1979 had different voting trajectories, all of which none the less included at least a period of support for the NF? This research note presents data on the numerical size of these different groups and it analyses some of their aggregate social and attitudinal characteristics.

scholarly journals The Impact of Government Debt on Economic Growth in Nigeria

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
ABDULKARIM YUSUF ◽  
Saidatulakmal Mohd.
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Output Growth ◽  
Series Data ◽  
Enhancement Effect ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Study Objective ◽  
Short Run ◽  
The Impact

Abstract The study investigated the effect of public debt on Nigeria’s economic growth using annual time series data from 1980-2018. In collecting, evaluating and interpreting secondary data relating to the study objective, the quantitative and ex-post facto research design was adopted. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag method was applied to assess the short and long-term linkages between economic growth and public debt indicators. The empirical results showed that external debt stock constituted an impediment to long-term growth but a short-run growth-enhancement effect. Domestic debt accretion had a noteworthy positive impact on long-term output growth, while its short-term effect was negative. In the long and short-term, debt service payments led to growth retardation, although the amount of foreign reserves greatly improved growth both in the long and short-run. The diagnostic tests results indicated no problems with non-normality, serial correlation, heteroscedasticity and error in the predicted model specification. The findings of this study suggest that concerted efforts should be made to boost domestic revenue generation and execute fiscal transformations that reduce public debt and deficit financing to a sustainable level, while ensuring that borrowed funds are deployed to support growth through productive and self-liquidating investments in principal sectors of the economy.

Liquidity versus Wealth in Household Debt Obligations: Evidence from Housing Policy in the Great Recession

2020 ◽  
Vol 110 (10) ◽  
pp. 3100-3138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Ganong ◽  
Pascal Noel
Keyword(s):  
Housing Policy ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Regression Discontinuity ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Difference In Differences ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Consumption Decisions ◽  
Research Designs ◽  
The Impact

We exploit variation in mortgage modifications to disentangle the impact of reducing long-term obligations with no change in short-term payments (“wealth”), and reducing short-term payments with no change in long-term obligations (“liquidity”). Using regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences research designs with administrative data measuring default and consumption, we find that principal reductions that increase wealth without affecting liquidity have no effect, while maturity extensions that increase only liquidity have large effects. This suggests that liquidity drives default and consumption decisions for borrowers in our sample and that distressed debt restructurings can be redesigned with substantial gains to borrowers, lenders, and taxpayers. (JEL E21, G21, G51, R38)

Disentangling media effects: The impact of short-term and long-term news coverage on Belgian emergency assistance

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 428-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeroen Joly
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
Emergency Assistance ◽  
The Impact

Whether and how media are able to influence policy and the political decision-making process is still the topic of much debate. However, if news media are indeed able to influence policy, they are commonly believed to do so indirectly through their agenda-setting function – by getting issues onto the political agenda after sudden peaks of attention. Yet, despite the assertion of agenda-setting theory that policy changes occur mainly through steady advocacy of policy alternatives, little attention has been paid to the long-term effects of media exposure. The analysis of emergency assistance in Belgium from 2000–2008 shows that short-term and long-term media attention to specific countries affect decision-making in quite different ways. This study reveals different ways in which media attention can impact policymaking, as short-term attention mainly determines which countries receive assistance, while long-term attention affects the amount of assistance granted.

Left Turn on Green?

2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (7) ◽  
pp. 814-838 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID S. BROWN ◽  
J. CHRISTOPHER BROWN ◽  
SCOTT W. DESPOSATO
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Left Turn ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
External Resources ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
Bank Funding ◽  
The Impact

This article presents the first attempt to examine the political consequences of internationally funded programs that target local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Although the purported mission of NGOs is often economic, humanitarian, or environmental, the authors suggest that their impact is also profoundly political. Injections of international resources into underdeveloped, often clientelistic societies can fundamentally change the nature of the local political arena, affecting access to economic resources, social benefits, and ultimately the quality of democratic representation. The authors analyze the impact external resources have on politics by examining a series of World Bank-funded projects based in the Brazilian Amazon from 1995 to 1997. They show that World Bank funding designed to channel resources to local groups had powerful effects in the political arena, increasing electoral support for the Left in the 1998 presidential race. This article has important implications for the growing role of NGOs and their influence on politics in the developing world.

The Politics of Welfare in Turkey

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erdem Yörük
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Assistance ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter examines the political dynamics that have shaped the transformation of the Turkish welfare system since the 1960s. Over the years, income-based social assistance policies have supplanted employment-based social security policies, while the welfare state has significantly expanded. To explain why and how the Turkish welfare state has expanded during neoliberalism and why social policies have shifted from social security to social assistance, the chapter focuses on the rivalries between mainstream parties and the impact of grassroots politics, as well as the political mechanisms that mediate and transform structural pressures into policies. The chapter illustrates that political efforts to contain the political radicalization of the informal proletariat and to mobilize its electoral support have driven the expansion of social assistance policies during the post-1980 neoliberal period. State authorities now see the informal proletariat as a more significant political threat and source of support than the formal proletariat whose dynamism drove the expansion of the welfare state during the pre-1980 developmentalist period. The chapter provides a historical analysis of the interaction between parliamentary processes and social movements in order to account for the transformation of welfare provision in Turkey. It concludes by locating Turkey in a larger context, in which other emerging markets develop similar welfare states as a response to similar political exigencies.

Adult Education, Stratification, and Regime Change: Upgrading and Sidestepping in Russia, 1965–2005

2019 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuliya Kosyakova ◽  
Theodore P. Gerber
Keyword(s):  
Adult Education ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Educational History ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
Market Opportunities ◽  
The Impact

Adult education influences how labor market opportunities are structured in the later life course. We propose a theoretical framework for understanding the stratifying role of adult education resting on the distinction between two forms of adult education—upgrading and sidestepping: Resources, incentives, and selection processes systematically structure rates of participation. Using educational history data from Russia, we test hypotheses derived from our framework and examine the impact of the Soviet collapse and the ensuing economic recovery. Upgrading exacerbates patterns of socioeconomic stratification by delivering better credentials to individuals with higher levels of initial resources. Sidestepping is less common than upgrading and less related to socioeconomic origins and previous attainment. The Soviet collapse produced short-term declines in the rates of both upgrading and sidestepping. However, once growth resumed, market institutions proved durable, and the political regime stabilized, rates of upgrading soared to levels exceeding those of the Soviet era.

Political and institutional constraints on structural reforms: interpreting the Italian experience

Modern Italy ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 423-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Fabbrini
Keyword(s):  
Financial Markets ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Institutional Constraints ◽  
The Political ◽  
Structural Reforms ◽  
Italian Experience ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Government

During 2011 Italy reached the verge of a financial default because of its huge public debt. Neither the centre-right nor the centre-left governments that alternated in power in the 2000s were able to introduce the reforms necessary for reducing the debt and promoting growth. The impotence of the government became incompatible with the requirements of the country's continued presence in the eurozone. In November 2011, under the pressure of financial markets and eurozone institutions and leaders, the incumbent centre-right government was obliged to resign, and was substituted by a government composed of technocrats and experts, the Monti government. This lasted until December 2012 and was supported in parliament by a cross-partisan coalition; it was able to introduce some of the structural reforms required, because of the threat of default but also because it did not need to seek the electoral support of powerful constituencies. This article advances an interpretation of the Italian crisis of November 2011, identifying the political and institutional structures and the specific political conditions that fostered a policy stalemate in the country in the 2000s and whose persistence makes the continuation of reforms after the February 2013 elections uncertain.

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