Louis M. Imbeau

Electoral and Partisan Cycles in the Canadian Provinces

This study tests explanations of the growth of Canadian provincial governments that draw from the political budget cycle approach. The approach assumes that governments jointly respond to electoral and partisan goals. When the next election is not expected soon, the government uses its discretionary power to pursue its ideological target. When the next election is near, politicians in government, fearing electoral defeat, deviate from their normal behaviour and engage in a re-election effort by undertaking an expansionary policy. This study suggests that provincial governments behave in the opportunistic fashion described by the model. Moreover, there is no sign that this opportunistic behaviour has been affected by government cutbacks in the 1990s.

Measuring Government Growth in the Canadian Provinces: Decomposing Real Growth and Deflator Effects

In this paper, we argue that, when measuring government growth, we should distinguish among three growth phenomena: growth resulting from the broader scope of government activity, referred to as real growth; growth that results from higher costs of providing government goods and services, referred to as deflator effect; and growth in the simple ratio of government expenditure to gross domestic product (GDP), nominal growth, which is due to the combined impact of real growth and deflator effect. Using data on provincial government spending, we show that, over the 1971-95 period, there has been no real growth in three provinces and that there has been a substantial deflator effect on provincial government growth in all ten provinces.

Is the “Veil of Ignorance” in Constitutional Choice a Myth? An Empirical Exploration Informed by a Theory of Power

A Constitution is a social contract defining a set of rules by which the governed agree to be governed. As such a Constitution ascribes power resources to governors while restraining the way they are expected to use them. But a Constitution is also a discourse on the prevailing conceptions of power relations in the society where it originated. More specifically, it tells a story about the types of power that need to be ascribed or restrained and those that need not. Looking at a Constitution from both viewpoints opens a new window for uncovering the motivations that drove its drafters in the Constitution-making process in which they were involved. In particular, it helps reveal the impact of uncertainty on Constitutional choices.

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.

Dissonance in Fiscal Policy: A Power Approach

The objective of this paper is to explore the relationship between speech and action in the budgetary process of provincial governments in Canada through a power approach. Using a three-dimensional approach to the concept of power, I ask the following question: Does the fiscal conservatism (liberalism) expressed by politicians in their policy speeches correspond to the fiscal discipline (indiscipline) they manifest when they improve (deteriorate) their budget balance? In other words, is there policy consonance or dissonance in the fiscal policy of the governments of Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, and under which conditions is dissonance useful for the general welfare? I proceed in two steps. First, I propose a conceptualization of the relationship between speech and action based on an analysis of power relationships in the policy process, which allows me to identify the conditions of a benevolent dissonance in fiscal policy. Second, I propose an empirical test of the model measuring fiscal discipline in action and fiscal conservatism in speeches and show that indeed provincial premiers often lack transparency but that this dissonance is very often beneficial for reaching the goal of properly financing public services.

Conclusion: Plea for a real epistemic pluralism

In their symposium article, Daigneault & Jacob (2012) remind us of the classical triangle of conceptual analysis: Term/Meaning/Empirical-referent. The general understanding of this triangle is that a term, the concept, is related, on the one hand, to a meaning – or a conception – through some sort of conceptual definition and, on the other hand, to the empirical world through an operational definition that ensues from the conceptual definition. Thus the triad is closed, and if we were only to be serious about defining our concepts, we would come to agree on the conceptions on which they are based and on the empirical referents to which they refer. But things are more complex than they appear. The complexity of social relations gives rise to more than one approach to conceptualizing. Here I would like to make the argument that the strategies for a sound conceptual analysis vary according to the intelligibility scheme – or the explanatory position – that one adopts. This argument is based on a remarkable book by the French sociologist, Jean-Michel Berthelot, L’Intelligence du Social (1990).1 In this conclusion I proceed in two steps: first I describe the six intelligibility schemes presented by Berthelot; and second I show how these schemes give rise to four conceptualization strategies, which I use to compare the contributions to this symposium.

Dissonance in Policy Processes: An Introduction

Policy dissonance – defined as a discrepancy or lack of harmony between what policy makers say or publish and what they do in terms of finance, regulation, administration, or coercion – is the object of four different political economic literatures: forecasting errors, time inconsistency, electoral pledges, and the partisan cycle hypothesis. This introduction reviews these four literatures. It then proposes two conceptual approaches to the inclusion of speech in political economic explanations – speech as the expression of preferences and speech as a policy tool – to raise the issue of rationality and bounded rationality, the issue of the function of policy speech – information, persuasion, or manipulation – as well as the issue of the tradeoffs between the democratic demand for transparency and the efficiency requirement of secrecy. The introduction concludes with the description of the contribution of each chapter to the understanding of dissonance in policy processes.

Do They Walk Like They Talk? A Conclusion

In this conclusion, we first provide a summary of the main theoretical and empirical conclusions reached by the contributors to this volume. Then, we argue that the empirical study of dissonance in policy processes must not only investigate whether policy makers do what they say but also whether what they say corresponds to what the public wants. In our concluding remarks, we ask the question whether dissonance is always pathological.