Does the Left Spend More? An Econometric Survey of Partisan Politics*

Abstract

This study provides a quantitative review of the empirical literature on partisan politics. Given the voluminous work on this subject, we focus on the relationship between government ideology and public spending. By exploiting a dataset of 800 estimates from papers published between 1992 and 2018, we find no evidence of publication bias. Taking into account the differences in the various categories of spending, proxies of ideologies, estimations methods, as well as, data and publication characteristics, we find evidence of a small positive and significant effect.