The Direct and Indirect Interactions between Ideology and Economic Growth. Five Essays applied to the French Case, 1870-2011
This Ph.D. dissertation seeks to investigate the links between the individuals' political ideology and economic growth. First, because individuals' social norms are supposed to influence the long-term economic growth, we are interested in how the political dimension of these norms affects a country's economic performance. In this context, we ask whether political ideology directly influences economic growth or indirectly, through transmission channels embodied in the policies for which the individuals vote. As a country's ideology can be defined as the society's choice regarding the appropriate level of the government intervention in the economy, we also ask whether the government intervention works as a transmission mechanism in the ideology-economic growth relationship. Second, to the extent that individuals' electoral behaviors reveal their political ideology, we study the impact of economic growth on the voters' ideology. More precisely, we aim to investigate how economic growth affects electoral behaviors. Therefore our goal is two-fold. We want to improve the understandings of the role played by the individuals' ideology in the process of economic growth and to enrich the economic growth literature. We also want to participate in the research on the determinants of the change in the individuals' ideology and beliefs. For that, we use a novel and comprehensive database covering all the French democratic experience since 1870. We also construct similar historical data for the U.S. and the U.K. but this dissertation is mainly applied to the French case. Studying individual countries over long periods of time, we use time-series analyses with annual data. Our results identify a causal effect from political ideology to economic growth all over the French democratic experience. We find that a move of the voters' ideology to the right impacts the long run economic growth positively. We also find that the growth effect of ideology is mediated by the size of government in the post-second-world-war period but not in the pre-war period. Therefore, our results suggest a direct effect of political ideology on economic growth in the pre-war period but an indirect effect in the post-war period. We find that the contrasting role of government size as a transmission mechanism before and after the Second World War can be explained by changing relationships between ideology and government intervention on the one hand and between government size and economic growth on the other hand. Our results also identify that the economic growth does not shift the country's ideology towards the left or the right. Nevertheless, we also find that economic growth influences the voters' ideological instability in the sense of a general change in the voting patterns.