Party Differences in Macroeconomic Policies and Outcomes
回顾了政党在宏观经济政策与结果上差异的研究，指出Hibbs和Beck的方法未考虑理论约束，并提出在宏观经济理论框架下估计政党差异的初步结果。
Although the nature of the differences between parties in democratic electoral politics is an enduring question in political science, surprisingly little is understood about the subject. But substantial progress has been made in recent years, most notably in understanding party differences in macroeconomic policies and outcomes. The first breakthrough was Douglas Hibbs's (1977) analysis of party-related differences in the unemployment rate. In his time-series analysis for the United States, Hibbs modeled the path of unemployment as an autoregressive-moving average process subject to a dummy variable intervention term indicating party of the president. His analysis indicated that Democratic administrations were associated with lower unemployment than Republicans by 2.36 points after eight years in office, and even larger differences in long-run equilibrium. A subsequent article by Nathaniel Beck (1982) addressed the same issue, and found the party differences less sharp when administration-specific policy differences are considered. The techniques employed by Hibbs and Beck focus directly on an outcome (unemployment), rather than on the policy instruments that are presumably responsible for altering outcomes. This approach can be misleading when there are long lags between implementation of policies and ultimate effects, or when shocks occasionally intrude upon the regular connections between instruments and outcomes. Macroeconomic theories can provide information about constraints linking macroeconomic variables, but Hibbs and Beck fail to incorporate theoretical constraints. Such constraints could help determine what kinds of outcomes are feasible and sustainable, and to what extent outcomes are induced by policies as opposed to shocks. Our purpose here is to consider how one might go about estimating party differences in a framework that takes advantage of some insights offered by macroeconomic theories, and to report some preliminary results. (A more complete description of the analysis is provided in our working paper, available upon request.)