Political frictions and public policy outcomes

We study the role of political frictions in public policy outcomes. We propose a simple model of fiscal policy that combines a lack of commitment by the government, political turnover, and another political friction that can be interpreted either as political polarization or as public rent-seeking. We show that political turnover increases public debt levels, while political polarization or public rent-seeking leads to higher public spending. We evaluate the importance of different political frictions for fiscal policy outcomes using a sample of twenty developed countries. We find that the data on political instability combined with the data on public rent-seeking explain 25% of the variation in public debt levels.