Austerity Politics Is the Electorate Responsible?

Sammanfattning: This thesis contributes to the public finance literature concerned with fiscal sustainability, and consists of an introduction and four stand-alone essays. The first three essays analyse the reasons why governments accumulate large levels of debt. In the first essay, I find that parties that implement fiscal consolidations are punished by the voters in the following election. However, there does not appear to be a rewarding effect for governments that implement fiscal expansions. The second essay, which is co-authored with Rafael Ahlskog, shows how voter opposition to fiscal consolidation is shaped by moral considerations and feelings of personal responsibility. More precisely, we argue that voters are more likely to refuse fiscal consolidation when they do not feel responsible for the public debt. The third essay argues that misperceptions about the business cycle would have caused fiscal problems even if policy-making was conducted by independent experts. According to my estimates, biased projections have weakened annual budget balances by approximately one per cent of GDP. In the fourth essay, I argue that budgetary mechanisms created to improve fiscal discipline have a bias toward a reduced public sector. Because discretionary decisions are usually required to adjust public expenditures to price and wage increases, periods of rapid growth have repeatedly caused the welfare state to shrink. I use the introduction to discuss the commonalities between the essays and to situate the field of public finance in a broader, historical context.