Voter mobilization with public cultural spending in small communities: evidence from Austria

This study seeks to identify the factors that moderate pre-electoral increases in culture budgets of small, rural municipalities, using a panel sample of 876 Austrian municipalities for the period 2010 to 2019. Whenever politicians increase public funding to mobilize their constituencies in the run-up to elections, they create cycles in the financial figures. These so-called political business cycles (PBCs) are manifestations of the incumbents’ pre-electoral mobilization efforts and allow to concisely study fiscal approaches to voter activation. Citizens of small municipalities have concentrated preferences and a relatively pronounced propensity for cultural goods, so the mere existence of PBCs in municipal cultural spending is not contentious. However, what are the factors that influence the cumulative financial output of get-out-the-vote efforts? In deduction of established literature on electoral politics, I hypothesize that the extent of the PBCs in municipal cultural spending is moderated by electoral competition and fragmentation, while the mayor’s ideology should not be a significant moderating influence. The results of the dynamic panel model provide evidence in favour of these expectations, except for political fragmentation, which does not seem to be determinative of PBCs. The conclusion is that increasing the culture budget seems to be a much-used allocative method of voter mobilization in competitive elections, which puts the commonplace that small communities lack political competition into question. By researching the policymakers’ propensity to make top-down fiscal value propositions in the run-up to elections, the study characterizes the strategic timing in budgetary politics and assesses the contextual factors of materialist political considerations in today’s era of post-materialism.