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AbstractWe study how welfare states regimes influence the effect of episodes of fiscal consolidations on the four main components of the welfare state: social investment, pensions, healthcare and labour market insurance. Welfare state regimes are associated with distinct social policy legacies that feedback into political competition by shaping the size and influence of different coalitions of constituents. Using data from 1980 to 2014 in 16 OECD countries, we find that labour market insurance is more vulnerable to consolidations in Liberal regimes, while social investments are more resistant to consolidations in Nordic regimes. In the Continental regime, which overlaps with Social Health Insurance systems, healthcare is more resistant to consolidations. Finally, pensions are more resistant to consolidations in the Southern regime. These findings contribute to the study of the comparative political economy of welfare state retrenchment.

While the drivers of preferences about tax progressivity and redistribution are well identified, the study of willingness to pay taxes remains underdeveloped. This article uses the 2016 ISSP on the Role of Government and the 2018 OECD Risks that Matter surveys to identify which groups of voters are more likely to be willing to pay taxes. It shows that ideology mediates the correlations between education or income and willingness to pay. Among the left, income and education tend to have a positive association with willingness to pay taxes, whereas both variables are negatively associated with willingness to pay among the right. Thus, the core constituencies of left-wing parties composed of socio-cultural professionals and of production and service workers have different tax policy preferences. Socio-cultural professionals, with their higher education and income, are significantly more willing to pay taxes than production and service workers, who share lower education and income.

When do political parties propose long-term investments? Electoral competitiveness should be a key variable explaining parties' investment priorities: parties can be less responsive to voters' short-term priorities and overcome time inconsistencies when they are more likely to win the next election. The article distinguishes the characteristics of three types of investments in education, environmental protection and technology and infrastructure, gathered from the Comparative Manifesto Project. It finds a linear positive relationship between parties' probability of entering office and the proportion of manifestoes allocated to statements about technology and infrastructure. In contrast, statements about education are highest at high levels of electoral competitiveness, as parties propose more education to attract voters, while statements about the environment are affected by parties' ideology on the left-right axis rather than by electoral competitiveness. Power-sharing institutions help parties to overcome time inconsistency problems, reducing the impact of electoral competition on investments.

Fiscal federalism, aging, and rising health care costs are constraining Canadian provinces' fiscal room to maneuver. Can provincial government partisanship influence policy choices when governments face fiscal pressures? This article studies the impact of fiscal pressures on provincial governments' expenditure priorities, conditional on government partisanship. It argues that policy feedback and the preferences of the governing party's core constituency determine expenditure priorities. Using a compositional dependent-variable analysis, it models budget policy choices in Canadian provinces from 1981 to 2018. When provinces undergo different types of fiscal pressures, the proportion of health care expenditures increases, while "other" government expenditures, which are the programs that are not classified as health care, education, or social spending, are retrenched. While governments' ideology does not modify the crowding out of "other" expenditures by health care, left-wing governments prioritize social expenditures, while right-wing governments retrench them.

Introduction Le tabagisme est considéré par l'Organisation mondiale de la Santé (OMS) comme une épidémie dont le vecteur est l'industrie du tabac. Une meilleure compréhension des stratégies de cette industrie est requise dans le cadre d'une démarche préventive. Or, la recherche historique à ce sujet demeure encore lacunaire en ce qui concerne la Suisse. Objectif Ce travail de thèse a pour objectif d'analyser les stratégies et les tactiques mises en œuvre par les fabricants de cigarettes afin de relever les principaux défis qui leur sont posés en Suisse entre 1962 (Rapport Smoking and health du Collège royal des médecins britanniques) et 2003 (Convention-cadre de l'OMS pour la lutte antitabac). Méthode Une recherche par mots-clés est effectuée dans les archives des cigarettiers mises en ligne sur le site des Truth Tobacco Industry Documents. D'autres sources – comme le fonds Burrus du Musée jurassien d'art et d'histoire, la Schweizerische Tabak-Zeitung et les Archives fédérales suisses – complètent ces documents qui sont analysés dans une perspective d'humanités en médecine. Résultats En s'appuyant sur plus de 1600 références, cette thèse documente les stratégies des cigarettiers face à quatre problématiques majeures : la nocivité du tabagisme actif, la menace de restrictions de la publicité pour les produits du tabac, l'addiction à la cigarette et la nocivité du tabagisme passif. La Commission scientifique de l'Association suisse des fabricants de cigarettes (ASFC), un des organes clés de l'industrie du tabac en Suisse à l'époque, est étudiée de manière approfondie. La question tabac et santé est également intégrée dans son contexte historique, politique, médical et social. Conclusion Grâce à une combinaison d'actions touchant les sphères politique, scientifique et publique, l'industrie du tabac est parvenue à évoluer dans un environnement de plus en plus hostile à ses produits et à traverser la période des quatre dernières décades du XXe siècle qui a vu le tabagisme passer du statut de comportement banal pour ...

AbstractPublic choice theory suggests that citizens have a deficit bias: they approve governments for running large deficits that increase spending or reduce taxes. In contrast, others contend that citizens reward governments for balanced budgets. We contribute to this debate by modelling a popularity function for the Canadian federal government and show that the impact of fiscal policies on the executive's popularity changes over time. Until the early 1990s, Canadians preferred budget deficits. As deficits became unsustainable during the economic crisis of the early 1990s, the government shifted its fiscal policy paradigm, as balancing the budget became its primary fiscal objective and citizens were actively concerned about the deficits. Since 1993, citizens' deficit bias morphed into an austerity bias: executive approval increases when deficits are reduced. These findings contribute to comparative political economy research by assessing how policy regimes and public preferences reinforce each other.

AbstractWhat are the political effects of fiscal consolidations? Theoretical considerations suggest that consolidations should reduce the public's support for their governments, but empirical studies have found surprisingly small effects on government support. However, most of these studies analyze electoral outcomes, which are separated from the consolidation by a multi-link causal chain. We argue that more direct measures of government support, such as executive approval, show much stronger negative effects of consolidation, since they are less affected by the strategic timing of consolidations or the political alternatives on offer. We analyze a time series cross-sectional dataset of executive approval in 14 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1978 to 2014, using the narrative approach to measure fiscal consolidations. We find that spending cuts decrease government approval, especially during economic downturns, but tax increases' impact on approval remains minimal. Finally, left- and right-wing governments are equally likely to lose approval after implementing austerity.

AbstractThis article examines the presence of geographically targeted spending in the allocation of infrastructure projects in Canada. Building on formal models of distributive politics, we expect government districts, core government districts and swing districts to be advantaged in terms of infrastructure projects. We also investigate whether characteristics of Members of Parliament (MPs), such as seniority or holding a cabinet position, influence the distribution of infrastructure projects. Empirically, we analyze the amount of funding allocated by Infrastructure Canada across non-urban federal electoral districts between 2006 and 2018. Our results indicate that non-urban governmental districts receive, on average, more money than opposition districts, and that this is even more the case for core government districts. In contrast, we found little evidence that cabinet ministers or senior MPs are able to attract more funding to their constituencies compared to other representatives.

The idea of targeting within universalism has been evoked frequently, usually as a best of both worlds' strategy. The approach remains difficult to identify, however, because targeting is usually measured as the opposite of universalism. This article proposes to consider targeting and universalism as two distinct dimensions of the welfare state, the opposite of universalism being more usefully understood as residualism, and not as pro-poor targeting. Four welfare state possibilities then emerge, combining a position on the universalism/residualism axis and one on the pro-poor/pro-rich axis: universalism (France, for instance), targeting within universalism (Denmark), targeting within residualism (the United States) and pro-rich residualism (Japan). We show that targeting within universalism entails pro-poor targeting without means testing, a combination that can be achieved with limits on the earnings-relatedness of the pension system and generous transfers to the working age population. Thus understood, targeting within universalism proves to be an effective redistributive strategy, better to redistribute than mere targeting, and less costly than universalism pure and simple.