Representatives on the Budgetary Commons: Democratic Responsiveness and Overspending Problems in Multi-Party Government

The common-pool problem has become a widely used metaphor in studies on distributive politics and public finance. It has been argued that representative policy-making is prone to overconsumption problems similar to those in the context of various physical resources. Accordingly, the lack of well-defined property rights and the partial internalisation of costs in political processes have been offered as explanations for the growth of the public sector, deficit bias and other fiscal phenomena. In my paper, I discuss the ways in which democratic responsiveness and accountability of representatives to the population affect representatives’ incentives to over-exploit the common pool of tax funds, and how electoral politics interacts with coordination problems among the representatives themselves. This helps design empirical analyses but also contributes to normative assessments concerning the democratic failure that the budgetary common-pool problem allegedly implies. The analysis is conducted in the context of multi-party governance in parliamentary systems.