Ideologues, Social Supporters, and Economic Policy across Regimes

• In Event: The Comparative Politics of Ideology and Social Support

Abstract

Researchers agree that left governments allied with workers in established democracies spend more on welfare, impose higher taxes, and regulate the economy more than right governments allied with economic elites. We know much less about whether economic ideology and social support also affect public spending on welfare, taxation, and economic regulation in young and non-democracies, even though they comprise most of the world's countries and population. I distinguish economic ideology, the belief of political elites about which policies are desirable, from social support, the types of social groups helping political elites to stay in office in return for favorable policies. I focus on the beliefs of political elites about how much the state should interfere into the economy, and their social support by economic groups, specifically agrarian elites and business elites as well as urban and rural workers. I further contend that political institutions shape the effect of ideology and social support: economic ideology matters less for economic policy if legislative institutions constrain the political elites in the executive, while social support matters more when legislative institutions are strong. I test these arguments with a statistical analysis of the relationships for all independent states from 1945 to 2017 drawing on self-collected data on ideology and novel data on social support. I employ several strategies to test the causal effect of ideology and social support on economic policy, including controls for potential confounders, country and year fixed effects, GMM estimation, and instrumenting domestic ideological and supporter changes with changes in neighboring states. The project contributes to ongoing conversations about whether economic ideology and social support matter for economic policy besides political institutions, whether politics in young and non-democracies differs from established democracies, and how much actors beliefs and interests matter for politics.

Author

• Bastian Herre, University of Chicago