Who spends more? Party Ideology and Public Spending in 16 Post-Socialist Countries

Abstract

The article is revisiting a never-concluded debate about the partisan effect on public spending. It explores the impact of the ruling parties' ideological orientation, operationalised in a single-dimensional left-right scale, on budget expenditures in Central and Eastern Europe. The research is conducted within an expanded time series covering the complete period since the fall of one-party regimes in sixteen former socialist countries, where the issue has remained under-studied, especially in comparison with a number of similar studies focusing mostly on developed Western democracies. The findings moderately support the main hypothesis demonstrating that, although an ideology matters, there are also other more significant predictors of the spending among political, economic or other contextual variables related to a specific transitional framework of the countries in question. The same conclusion applies to the total consumption, as well as to the examined budget segments of social transfers and education, while the environmental spending seems to be completely unrelated to the partisan variable.