| Abstract | dc.description.abstract | Social spending programs are important political issues, and it would be interesting
to know how political systems affect the amount spent by the public sector.
Much of the cross-country data is difficult to interpret, because richer countries
simultaneously have different political systems (they tend to be more
democratic) and more generous government budgets for old age, medical, and
other social programs. Since South American countries seem to have a much
weaker association between economic and political situations, we can mitigate
this collinearity by comparing South American countries with each other and
with the world. All of our data show that democracies spend the same or somewhat
less on social programs as economically and demographically similar
nondemocracies. Pension spending has grown relative to nonpension social
spending (1960-90), but some of our evidence suggests that this change in the
composition of spending has been more pronounced in countries that were initially
nondemocratic. | en_US |
