The effect of the cabinet’s ideological composition on economic growth in the Visegrád countries

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between the ideological composition of government cabinets and changes in economic activities in the Central European Region. Often, electoral rhetoric about right-wing governments being financially prudent and left-wing governments being “tax and spend” actors still holds sway in public discussion. However, empirical analysis and academic research have rarely backed such claims. The research hypothesis is that economic activity is mostly independent of who governs, also known as policy convergence. The article aims to test the policy convergence thesis on four Visegrád countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). The research applied hierarchical models to estimate the effects of the ideological composition of the cabinet on the quarterly change of real GDP while controlling for other relevant predictors. The results confirmed the policy convergence thesis because the effects of various cabinets were neither substantial nor meaningful.

KEYWORDS:

• Central and Eastern European countries
• government ideology
• political parties
• economic growth
• hierarchical model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The paper was supported by the research project of the Masaryk University “Perspectives of European Politics in the Context of Global Politics III” (MUNI/A/1138/2020)

2. All the countries selected entered the European Union in 2004 after passing the Copenhagen criteria. Such recognition is proof of democratic rules and institutions having been incorporated into the domestic polity.

3. Polish Left-leaning governments, however, have fewer observations in the dataset and they were in power at the end of ‘90s and the beginning of the new millennium. This period had a volatile economic growth that is captured in the standard deviation metric.

4. When trying a simple linear regression on interval variables in the model (without accounting for cabinet composition or country), lagging domestic GDP growth by 1 and 2 quarters did not improve the model in terms of the residual standard error. These lagged variables also had a confidence interval containing zero, so we decided to simplify the model and remove them from further analysis.

5. We took into an account the share of seats in the cabinet for each political party and their dominant ideological leaning.

6. The model computes the level of association between these variables. It is not meant to be the proof of causality.

7. Official website: https://cpds-data.org/.

8. Web link: https://osf.io/ugtqx/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Perspectives of European Politics in the Context of Global Politics III [MUNI/A/1138/2020].