Superficially, the period of Conservative rule since 2010 has been one of electoral stability. The Conservatives emerged as the largest party in four general elections in a row. As a result, the party has retained the reins of power for fourteen years. This represents the second longest period of government tenure for any one party in post-war British politics. Yet, in truth, it has been a period of unprecedented electoral instability and political change. Two of the four elections produced a hung parliament, an outcome that had only occurred once before in the post-war period, while a third only produced a small overall majority. After the first of these hung parliaments, in 2010, Britain was governed by a coalition for the first time since 1945, while in the second such parliament, between 2017 and 2019, a minority government entered into a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionists. The right of prime ministers to call an election at a time of their own choosing was taken away, only to result in parliamentary tussles that, in the event, failed to stop two prime ministers from eventually holding an election well before the parliamentary term was due to come to an end.

In Chapter 3, we focus on explaining the tradeoffs between expenditure categories in government budgets. Rather than explain total expenditures or expenditures in specific policy areas, we argue that the competition for expenditures is in the spending allocations. Governments of varying ideological stances prefer increasing or decreasing spending for different policy areas, but we argue that their ability to do this is hindered by their government status. Governments with a majority of the seats in the lower house of parliament are better able to push through their preferred changes to spending budgets. Using a compositional methodological approach on data for 33 developed democracies across 35 years (1975–2010), we find that government ideology does influence budgetary allocations for majority governments, with left and right governments altering budgets in different, but expected, ways. For minority governments, our results suggest they too are strategic in making relative budgetary changes, but it is less about ideology and more about appeasing the necessary political parties in order to stay in power. This focus on budgetary compositions highlights the political competition for resources between policy areas that previous work has overlooked.

We turn to the larger pieces of the budget in Chapter 5, where we focus on two objectives. First, we ask how the components of the budgets fit together by conducting causality tests for the full range of possible relationships between expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility using a panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) model. We find that changes to expenditures and revenues drive changes to deficits, and we also find that changes to deficits lead to revenue changes. Second, using findings from these causality tests from the pVAR model, we then test our expectations about ideology and context on total spending, revenues, budget deficits, and budgetary volatility. Once we include these causal relationships in our models, we find that government ideology and majority status do not appear to alter either total expenditures or revenues, but a shift from a left to a right majority government is associated with a long-run decrease in deficits. For budgetary volatility, a move from a left to a right majority government corresponds with a positive significant increase in volatility. These findings fit our expectations that it is political competition that shifts budgets, with government ideology many times proctoring for those differences.

In Chapter 2, we begin with a discussion of the vast literature on political budgeting. We identify three main types of approaches in the extant literature – studies focusing on single budgetary categories, studies of budgetary changes, and studies of aggregate budgetary components. While each of these approaches has provided helpful insights into the relationships between politics and budgeting, they have ignored or greatly simplified the complex tradeoffs and interworkings of budgetary components. Our theoretical argument of political budgeting engages with both the compositional tradeoffs that occur across expenditure categories and the simultaneous interplay between expenditures, revenues, budgetary volatility, and deficit components of budgets. We argue that government ideology and the priorities of core supporters of governments drive their general budgetary priorities; however, domestic and international contexts can make it easier or harder for governments to implement these priorities. Focusing on the contexts of government power, electoral timing, economic conditions, globalization, and conflict affect governments’ budgetary abilities, we put forth a theoretical argument that governments may be unable to fulfil their ideological preferences when external contexts constrain their behavior.

Zimbabwe’s 1995 general election was conducted in the context of a ferocious debate on the country’s controversial constitution and a disastrous economic structural adjustment programme (ESAP). Zanu PF had already won a parliamentary majority well before votes were cast. It had the advantage of having thirty presidentially appointed MPs and fifty-five of its sitting MPs stood unopposed. The national voters’ register remained in a complete shambles. A weak and divided political opposition seemed to be a permanent feature in the country. Zanu PF neither accepted nor tolerated political opponents, believing it had entitlement to be in power forever. Zanu PF participation in the anti-colonial liberation war was a major justification for supressing political opposition parties. Zanu PF’s mindset was, by hook or crook, de jure or de facto bent on achieving a one-party state. The hallmarks of the 1995 elections were the controversial constitution, weak opposition, Zanu PF’s manipulation, and bending and breaking of election rules, including its lack of political will to develop a viable voters’ roll. The economic structural adjustment programme had already ruined peoples’ livelihoods by the mid-1990s. The source of violence emanated from Zanu PF’s non-acceptance and intolerance of competitive election contests, including within its own leadership selection processes.

This chapter explores power sharing as an institutional means of ending conflict. Power sharing is presumably able to address the credible commitment problem and accommodate societal diversity, thus improving the sustainability of peace deals. The chapter discusses two approaches to sharing power: autonomy (associated with efforts to manage diversity) and consociation (linked to attempts to overcome the credible commitment problem). The chapter then turns to concerns about the use of power sharing as a tool of peace-making. Critics of autonomy argue that autonomous institutions are the first step on the road to secession, whereas critics of consociationalism contend that, while it may secure peace, it prevents the achievement of democracy. The chapter concludes that, if it is to fulfil the promise of delivering peace and democracy, power sharing must be adapted to context, flexible enough to accommodate change and designed in such a way as to address its blinders and limitations.