The weak government argument claims that fractionalized governments (coalition or minority governments) have more difficulty increasing their tax revenues or decreasing their spending than majority governments. This implies that weaker governments are associated with higher government deficits....

Empirical research of political business cycles (PBCs) may suffer from endogeneity bias when incumbent governments have discretion to call for an early election. Using an instrumental variable (IV) routine on data from Japan and the U. K., we find strong evidence to support the notion that...