Representation at the Margins: The Case of Partisan Public Spending in Canada

This paper is an attempt to test the partisanship hypothesis in bud-getary politics, in Canada. I make use of federal budget data to esti-mate the policy biases of both the Liberal Party of Canada and the different forms of conservative parties of the last 20 years. I show that, controlling for macroeconomic factors and the political business cycle, there seems to be no partisan effect in Canada, at least in the eight policy domains under study. ∗This version is a preliminary draft published specifically for the 2009 Canadian Polit-ical Science Association annual meeting. Please do not cite. 1