Douglas A. Hibbs

Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy

This study examines postwar patterns in macroeconomic policies and outcomes associated with left-and right-wing governments in capitalist democracies. It argues that the objective economic interests as well as the subjective preferences of lower income and occupational status groups are best served by a relatively low unemployment-high inflation macroeconomic configuration, whereas a comparatively high unemployment-low inflation configuration is compatible with the interests and preferences of upper income and occupational status groups. Highly aggregated data on unemployment and inflation outcomes in relation to the political orientation of governments in 12 West European and North American nations are analyzed revealing a low unemployment-high inflation configuration in nations regularly governed by the Left and a high unemployment-low inflation pattern in political systems dominated by center and rightist parties. Finally, time-series analyses of quarterly postwar unemployment data for the United States and Great Britain suggests that the unemployment rate has been driven downward by Democratic and Labour administrations and upward by Republican and Conservative governments. The general conclusion is that governments pursue macroeconomic policies broadly in accordance with the objective economic interests and subjective preferences of their class-defined core political constituencies.

Industrial Conflict in Advanced Industrial Societies

This study focuses on strike activity during the 1950–1969 period in ten industrial societies, The first section of the paper deals with issues of strike measurement and introduces a three-dimensional characterization of strike activity which forms the basis of the subsequent statistical analyses. The next section examines postwar trends in industrial conflict in order to evaluate the argument that strike activity is “withering away” in advanced industrial societies. Time plots of the aggregate volume of industrial conflict show that there has been no general downward movement in strike activity during the postwar period. The third part of the paper develops a number of theoretically plausible statistical models to explain year-to-year fluctuations in the volume of strikes. The empirical results of this section indicate that (1) there is a pronounced inverse relationship between strike activity and the level of unemployment, which suggests that on the whole strikes are timed to capitalize on the strategic advantages of a tight labor market; (2) industrial conflict responds to movements in real wages rather than money wages, which indicates that labor is not misled by a “money illusion”; (3) Labor and Socialist parties are not able to deter strike activity in the short-run despite their strong electoral incentive to do so; and (4) the volume of strikes does seem to be influenced by the relative size of Communist parties, which suggests that such parties remain important agencies for the mobilization of discontent and the crystallization of labor-capital cleavages.

On the Political Economy of Long-Run Trends in Strike Activity

Outbursts of strike activity in many industrial societies during the late 1960s and early 1970s focused considerable attention on relations between labour, capital and the state in advanced capitalist systems and led to many inquiries into the sources of the ‘new’ labour militancy. The events of May–June 1968 in France, the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969 in Italy, and the nation-wide strikes of the coal miners in 1972 and 1974 in the United Kingdom (the first since the great General Strike of 1926) are the most dramatic examples, but sharp upturns in strike activity in Canada (1969, 1972), Finland (1971), the United States (1970) and smaller strike waves in other nations also contributed to the surge of interest in labour discontent.

Economic Outcomes and Political Support for British Governments among Occupational Classes: A Dynamic Analysis

The first section of the article establishes the political salience of macroeconomic issues to the British electorate, reviews the distributional consequences of macroeconomic outcomes, and suggests that unemployment outcomes in particular have strong class-related distributional effects. The second part presents a dynamic model of how rational voters evaluate the governing party, based on the idea that voters evaluate the cumulative performance of the governing party relative to the prior performance of the current opposition. Since the present relevance of prior outcomes decays over time, voters weight current performance more heavily than past performance informing contemporaneous political judgments. The empirical analyses in the third section include measures of nominal economic performance (inflation and exchange rate movements) and real economic performance (unemployment and real income fluctuations). The regression results indicate that the responses of political support among the occupational classes to macroeconomic changes are sizeable, and that the cross-class variations are consistent with the distributional consequences reviewed at the beginning of the article. The concluding section develops the electoral implications of the empirical results and presents a novel interpretation of trends in class-related political support for the parties. The evidence shows that the argument that there has been a persistent decline of class-based political alignments in Britain is erroneous.

Income Distribution in the United States

Political action has affected postwar income distribution in the United States mainly through policy-induced variations in macroeconomic activity and government transfer benefits in proportion to total income. We present a small dynamic model of the connections among the partisan balance of power, macroeconomic fluctuations, transfer spending trends, and income distribution outcomes. The model is based on the premise that the parties have different distributional goals, and it is designed to identify how shifts in party control of the presidency and the strength of the parties in Congress have affected the distribution of after-tax, after-transfer income by influencing cyclical economic performance and the flow of resources to transfer programs. We therefore extend the “partisan theory†of macroeconomic policy to the domain of income distribution outcomes.

PRESIDENT REAGAN'S MANDATE FROM THE 1980 ELECTIONS A Shift to the Right?

This article presents evidence from statistical data, statistical models, and electoral surveys indicating strongly that the substantial victory of Reagan and the Republicans in 1980 was the predictable consequence of poor economic performance under Carter and the Democrats and did not represent an ideological “shift to the right” by the electorate. The latter part of the article discusses the implications of this conclusion for public support for the Reagan administrations social and economic program, and for the Republican partys political prospects in 1982 and 1984.

Public Reactions to the Growth of Taxation and Government Expenditure

Opinion poll and behavioral evidence indicates that public resistance to the growth of taxation and state expenditure has increased significantly during the last decade in many advanced industrial democracies. This paper examines trends in the magnitude, composition, and consequences of taxation and government spending in relation to cross-national patterns of popular opposition to the expansion of the welfare state in five European industrial societies. The evidence suggests that the politically optimal system of taxation and expenditure relies heavily on indirect and programmatic taxes rather than on direct, general-revenue levies, and channels state resources toward cash transfers to households rather than into labor-intensive public consumption.

2. Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr. 1977. “Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy.” American Political Science Review 71 (December): 1467–1487 Cited 492 times.

I began working on “Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy” in 1974, delivered the paper at the August 1975 meetings of the World Econometric Society in Toronto and the APSA in San Francisco, and shortly thereafter submitted it to the Review, where it languished for more than a year before it was accepted (just barely, I sensed) after a change of editor. The articles title is somewhat misleading because the evidence pertained to the influence of government partisanship on macroeconomic outcomes.