Fiscal Politics, edited by Vitor Gaspar, Sanjeev Gupta, and Carlos Mulas-Granados published by IMF (2017).
“Fiscal Politics seeks to capture the politics of fiscal policymaking, and thus revives a tradition in political economy that gradually left the mainstream. This tradition takes economic, social, and political processes as co-determined and co-evolutionary.1 The inspiration for the book’s title comes from the work of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, drawing on his two seminal contributions: a theory of democracy and the concept of the tax state.
In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter (1942) defines democratic regimes as a set of institutions leading to a struggle for political power—a competition to win the people’s vote and gain the right to exercise that power. This view influenced the work of subsequent political economists, most notably Downs (1957), who portrayed electoral politics as a fight for the median voter…”
