Political parties and public investments: a comparative analysis of 22 Western democracies

When do political parties push for public investments in education, research, and infrastructure? Existing literature has mainly answered this question by pointing to parties’ state?market ideology. In contrast, this article presents a novel argument highlighting the role of parties’ aspirations to office and their ambitions to maximize votes. It builds on the idea that investments not only constitute redistributive tools for politicians, but also work as public means to foster economic growth in the long run. This unique feature makes investments attractive for parties with high office and vote aspirations, because they anticipate government responsibility in the future and can use investments’ dispersed growth effects to appeal broadly to a large, heterogeneous pool of voters. Support for this claim is found through time-series cross-sectional analyses of party manifestos from 22 Western democracies between 1947 and 2013. Results also indicate that parties’ positions on the second social value dimension matter.     

国家经济安全与外国投资法律问题

国家经济安全问题产生的原因在于经济规模的扩大、世界经济全球化和区域经济一体化。发达国家的经济保护措施等。外国投资①会产生产业控制、市场侵占、资源争夺等危害,也会带来增强国内企业实力、促进市场合理竞争、缓解就业问题等好处,因此应当针对本国经济的主要矛盾,因时因势地决定外资政策。我国现行外资立法存在着缺乏统一政策制定和协调部门,外资投向的产业政策不明、竞争法不完善等问题,应当采取一系列立法措施加以解决。