9 - Partisan Strategies and Electoral Coalitions

Summary

Our inquiry into the sources of economic policymaking in the advanced world has pinpointed a tight relationship between the governing partisan coalition and the selection of particular structural economic strategies. As shown by both the statistical evidence of Chapters 3 and 4 and the historical examination of Britain and Spain in the 1980s, conservative governments cut taxes, slash public investment programs, sell most public businesses, and revamp the labor market to increase the profitability of capital and to induce the unemployed to actively search for jobs. Socialist cabinets, instead, raise tax rates on high-income brackets and boost public spending on infrastructure and human capital in order to ease the transition from an unskilled population profile to a well-educated workforce without having to lower the social wage.

Such a powerful link between economic policies and partisan politics has led us inevitably to explore the electoral motives that guide the behavior of parties and the electoral dynamics behind the development of each economic strategy. Accordingly, the book has moved beyond its initial assumption that parties adopt different economic policies due to the redistributive consequences they have on clear-cut electoral constituencies. This has been done in a theoretical manner in Chapter 2 and then, mostly in empirical terms, through an analysis of the Spanish and British experiences. As discussed in this chapter, the result has been a more elaborate and complex set of arguments about the electoral dimensions of economic policymaking, and hence about the actual interaction of politics and economics.