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Several studies have demonstrated the impact of political and institutional characteristics on communities' fiscal policies. Typically, these characteristics have been studied in isolation, and possible interactions with other political determinants have been ignored. Yet, fiscal policy decisions are subject to political and institutional forces contemporaneously. This study combines different models to explain the variation in the Flemish local income tax rate and the local property tax rate simultaneously. The results of the individual analyses are equated with those of the joint analysis, thereby concluding that isolated testing may suffer from specification bias.

Several studies have demonstrated the impact of political and institutional characteristics on communities' fiscal policies. Typically, these characteristics have been studied in isolation, and possible interactions with other political determinants have been ignored. Yet, fiscal policy decisions are subject to political and institutional forces contemporaneously. This study combines different models to explain the variation in the Flemish local income tax rate and the local property tax rate simultaneously. The results of the individual analyses are equated with those of the joint analysis, thereby concluding that isolated testing may suffer from specification bias. Adapted from the source document.

This article offers new evidence on the political determinants of local government's public investment policy. A public infrastructure investment function was estimated using data for 307 out of 308 Flemish municipalities covering the period 1996-2009. The results reveal that government composition and the timing of the elections matter. The presence of the Liberal Party decreases investments, whereas fragmentation of the government has the opposite effect. Significantly higher investment levels were recorded in years preceding elections contrary to post-election years, which show important slowdown in investment policies. Finally, the analysis shows that local governments are sensitive to the investment policy of neighbouring municipalities. The positive spatial interaction effect implies that a municipality's investments increase on average with 26.2% of changes in investment levels by neighbouring municipalities. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract
This paper discusses the literature on strategic use of debt models and tests the seminal models of Persson & Svensson (1989) and Alesina & Tabellini (1990) on a dataset of Flemish municipalities. The literature on strategic deficit and debt behaviour originates from the question whether or not incumbent policymakers run higher budget deficits than they would if they were confident of re-election. In this paper, we introduce a vote function to estimate the probability of electoral defeat and present evidence of strategic debt in line with Persson & Svensson (1989), but only for leftist governments with expected vote percentages below 49%. There is no indication that rightist governments without re-election prospects are sensitive to strategic debt behaviour.

AbstractAlthough strategic consensus is a core concept in strategic management research, empirical evidence is lacking on (1) the degree of strategic consensus in public organizations, (2) how strategic consensus is impacted by group characteristics specific to public strategic decision‐making groups, and (3) how strategic plans impact these relationships. An analysis of multisource data from 1,075 governing majority members nested in 256 Flemish municipalities (Belgium) indicates that within‐group strategic consensus varies among governing majorities and is negatively impacted by political diversity and political power, but these relationships are mediated by perceived strategic plan quality. The results indicate that the idiosyncrasies of public decision‐making groups can impede high levels of strategic consensus, but strategic plans can attenuate this effect by fulfilling a boundary‐spanning role.

The level of revenues pocketed by a government during the fiscal year often deviates from that projected by this government in its budget. Despite a flourishing literature on, for example, the technical or procedural determinants of such forecast errors, little is yet known about how political stratagems may affect forecast errors. In the present paper, we analyse whether differences in the level of government fragmentation are useful in explaining local government tax revenue forecast errors – controlling for various other factors. Using data on 242 Flemish municipalities for the period 1992-2002, we find that two-party governments are more optimistic than single-party governments. In contrast to our initial expectations, governments with at least three parties are significantly more careful (or less optimistic) in their revenue projections than single- or twoparty governments. ; Die Einnahmen einer Regierung während eines Steuerjahres weichen oft von den vorherigen Budgetkalkulationen dieser Regierung ab. Diese Prognosefehler sind zwar schon bezüglich ihres technischen und institutionellen Kontextes empirisch erforscht worden, allerdings fehlt es bisher an Kenntnissen, was den Effekt politischer Variablen betrifft. In der vorliegenden Veröffentlichung wird untersucht, ob die politische Fragmentierung der lokalen Regierungen einen wichtigen Faktor zur Erklärung von Prognosefehlern darstellt, dabei immer kontrollierend für verschiedene andere Elemente. Unsere empirische Analyse von 242 der 308 flämischen Gemeinden im Zeitraum 1992-2002 zeigt erstens, dass Regierungen mit zwei Parteien eher optimistisch ihr Budget planen. Sie setzen mehr Einnahmen voraus, als sie während des Steuerjahres bekommen. Im Gegensatz zu unserer Hypothese zeigt die Analyse aber auch, dass ab 3 Parteien in einer Regierung die Überschätzung der Einnahmen geringer wird.

New Public Management popularized performance measurement in public organizations. Underlying performance measurement's popularity is the assumption that it injects performance information (PI) into decision‐making, thus rationalizing the ensuing decisions. Despite its popularity, performance measurement is criticized. In part, this criticism results from the limited knowledge of the conditions under which PI is purposefully used by politicians. We conducted a survey experiment based on real PI with 1,240 politicians. We hypothesized that PI has a positive impact on performance information use (PIU) when PI is benchmarked with coercive, mimetic or normative pressures. Moreover, due to negativity bias we expected this positive impact to be stronger when PI signals low performance. We found that normative pressures had a positive impact on actual PIU while coercive pressures positively affected intended PIU. Negativity bias is only relevant when linked to coercive pressures and intended PIU for analysing the organization's finances.