I sistemi elettorali e la politica fiscale: il caso italiano dal 1861 ai giorni nostri

This paper aims to the analysis of the rules electoral effects on fiscal policy, respect to the Italian case: in fact Italy, since 1861 until nowadays, modified several times its electoral system, switching from the majoritarian to the proportional system. In particular here we focus on the effects of different electoral systems on the “size” of the government, measured in terms of public expenditure, taxation and public deficit, and the “composition” of the government, measured in terms of redistributive expenditure. Differently from other empirical works, focussing on the effects of different political systems on several countries, i.e. a cross-sections analysis, this paper concerns a single country, Italy, according to a time-series perspective, 140 years. In this empirical analysis we confirm previous results of the literature: in general majoritarian electoral systems devote less financial resources either to the size and to the composition of the government respect to the proportional systems.