In this paper we argue that the political budget cycle test for opportunistic spending is weakened by the absence of a strong reason for why spending increases should be restricted to the time period leading into the next election. One would expect that a targeted benefit should elicit the same degree of voter support whenever it is received. Here we argue that while the political need to fulfill a list of pre-election promises serves to constrain excessive spending, the characteristic that some expenditure items better demonstrate the contributions of the current government to voters (with depreciating memories) leads to a predictable reallocation of the composition of budgetary spending across the life of a government. Our test for a predictable timing pattern to subcomponents of the budget uses capital expenditures as the budgetary item with greater visibility spillovers and a data set of 14 Indian states over 54 years (1959/60–2012/13). The predictions that capital expenditures relative to both total government expenditure and government consumption should rise across the governing interval are found to be consistent with the data and provide a better fit with the data than more traditional political budget cycle models that use aggregate spending/deficits in the pre-election period.

中文翻译：

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支出可见性和选民记忆：1959–2012年印度各州政治预算周期的一种构成方法

在本文中，我们认为，由于没有充分的理由将支出增加限制在下一次选举之前的时期，因此对机会性支出的政治预算周期测试被削弱了。有人希望，有针对性的利益在获得时应能获得相同程度的选民支持。在这里，我们认为，尽管履行一系列选举前承诺的政治需要可以限制过多的支出，但某些支出项目可以更好地证明当前政府对选民的贡献（具有贬值的记忆），这导致了可预见性的重新分配。政府整个生命周期的预算支出构成。我们对预算各组成部分的可预测时序模式的测试使用资本支出作为预算项目，具有更大的可见性溢出效果，并使用54年内（1959 / 60–2012 / 13）的14个印度州的数据集。相对于总政府支出和政府消费而言，资本支出应在整个治理区间内增加的预测被发现与数据一致，并且与使用总支出/赤字的传统政治预算周期模型相比，该数据更适合数据。选举前时期。