Jérôme Couture

Do Governments Manipulate Their Revenue Forecasts? Budget Speech and Budget Outcomes in the Canadian Provinces

This essay aims at documenting and explaining the gap between speech and action through a comparison of revenue forecasts published in Budget Speeches and actual revenues reported in provincial public accounts in Canada from 1986 to 2004. We look for two potential sources of revenue forecast errors: uncertainty and political manipulation. Our regression analysis shows that these errors are related to uncertainty: When economic conditions improve, government revenue is underestimated. Furthermore dependency on federal transfers proved to have an equivocal impact. It led to underestimation in the period of fiscal liberalism and to overestimation in the period of fiscal restraint. We also found that revenue forecasting is subject to political manipulation. Revenue is systematically overestimated in election years and governments of the right significantly underestimated their revenue in the more recent period. Finally, where there is an anti-deficit law, revenue forecast errors are lower.

The differentiated effects of health on political participation

Background Several studies have shown that an individuals state of health can significantly affect their decision to vote, but analysis is often only done on a single level of government; the national level. However, prior research has shown that the determining factors for voting can differ according to the level of government being considered. Our analysis is the first attempt to take a comprehensive look at the magnitude of health and political participation in a same country on different levels. Methods Based on Canadian General Social Survey-Social Identity (2013; N = 27 695), we examined both the direct and indirect effect of self-rated health and self-rated mental health on (1) national voter turnout; (2) local voter turnout and (3) other forms of political participation. Results The results show that health has a different effect on turnout depending the level of government. While health certainly affects participation on both levels of government, general health significantly affects national electoral participation levels while mental health more significantly affects electoral participation on the municipal level. Additionally, people who consider their mental health to be poorer, are more likely to sign an online petition. Conclusions These elements highlight the necessity of questioning the cost of voting according to the level of government, and that further research into the potential offered by Internet and remote voting, is worthwhile-despite the opinions of critics who eschew these means of voting.

Turnout in Local Elections: Evidence from Canadian Cities, 2004–2014

We provide the first wide-scale analysis of the factors that influence voter turnout in Canadian local elections. Drawing on original data from 300 municipal elections conducted from 2004 to 2014, we use ordinary least squares regression with panel-corrected standard errors for time series cross-sections to test explanatory hypotheses related to differences in institutional design, the social-spatial context of these elections, and local competitiveness. Our results show that, although institutional and sociospatial factors influence local turnout, the competitiveness of elections exercises the greatest influence on local electoral participation.