Fiscal Policy, Public Debt Stabilization and Politics: Theory and Evidence from the US and UK

This paper presents a two-party model of fiscal and debt policy which; (i) explicitly models the partisan, stabilisation, and (to some extent) survival motives of politicians; (ii) has predictions that are largely consistent with existing empirical findings about partisan and electoral effects in government expenditure, tax revenue, and debt; (iii) yields new predictions about how the feedback of fiscal policy on lagged debt may depend on partisan and electoral effects. These new predictions are not rejected by a test of the model on US and UK data.