IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-05108116.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Political parties’ ideological bias and convergence in economic outcomes

Author

Listed:
  • Zeeshan Hashim

    (Brunel University London [Uxbridge])

  • Jan Fidrmuc

    (LEM - Lille économie management - UMR 9221 - UA - Université d'Artois - UCL - Université catholique de Lille - Université de Lille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Sugata Ghosh

    (Brunel University London [Uxbridge])

Abstract

In democracies, policies are jointly shaped by voters' preferences and politicians' (or parties') ideological biases. We explore the relative importance of the latter on some key economic outcomes – growth rate, inflation and inequality – in a broad sample of 71 democracies from 1995 to 2019. We find evidence that both left-wing and right-wing governments deliver convergent outcomes as regards growth, inflation and inequality. The same applies to the policy outcome of economic freedom. This indicates that consolidated democracies maintain continuity in economic policies, and a change in government from one political ideology to another with a different ideology does not significantly alter economic policy outcomes. However, we find divergence in hybrid regimes; inequality and economic freedom are reduced under leftist governments, and economic freedom is enhanced by rightist governments.

Suggested Citation

  • Zeeshan Hashim & Jan Fidrmuc & Sugata Ghosh, 2025. "Political parties’ ideological bias and convergence in economic outcomes," Post-Print hal-05108116, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05108116
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102669
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05108116. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.