collective action problem of managing self-interested politicians and bureaucrats who might otherwise succumb to CP&A temptations.<sup>30</sup> Keefer provides two measures for the quality of political parties: one is the fraction of parties that are programmatic and the other is the number of years the ruling party has existed less the number of years the current executive has been in office. The latter captures the fact that many countries are ruled by parties that are more oriented around a single personality than an agenda. Thus, a ruling party that was started by one man who has been the executive for the duration of the party would receive a score of zero.<sup>31</sup> By contrast a decades old mature party with leaders holding office for no more than 8 years at a time would receive a very high score. The highest score in the sample is 118 years for Norway. The set of hypotheses tested here are that mature programmatic ruling parties, denoted here by “ _MPP_ ”, would be more likely to minimize aggregate and compositional deviations directly and through counter-cyclical behavior.

**_H06:  Presidential systems versus parliamentary systems_ .** Table 5 shows that presidential systems found in 101 of the 159 country observations in the sample.  Persson, Roland, and Tabellini (1997) argue that the presidential system with its separation of powers is likely to display smaller government and less corruption.  In particular, the concentration of power found in parliamentary systems tempts abuse and is thus empirically correlated with higher degree of corruption.  Cheibub (2006) also finds favor with presidential systems, providing evidence that they generate smaller budget deficits than parliamentary systems because voters know it is the executive branch that is responsible for budget execution and can vote out the president (or his/her party in congress) if they are not satisfied.  He also finds evidence that the relatively weaker performance of parliamentary systems cannot be traced to the costs of maintaining coalition governments as seen in some countries.<sup>32</sup>

These ideas can be applied to budget execution. If presidential systems are more likely to have smaller budget deficits and are less likely to be corrupt, then perhaps they would also display a comparatively better quality of budget execution directly and through counter-cyclical financing. To test these hypotheses, a dummy (denoted as “ _System_ ”) can be employed, based on information taken from the World Bank Database of Political Institutions.<sup>33</sup> The dummy is set to one for presidential systems, so that a zero signifies parliamentary systems and assembly-led electoral systems.<sup>34</sup> Gerring, Thacker, and Moreno (2005) provide a counter-argument. They maintain that parliamentary systems should exhibit a better quality of governance than presidential systems because political control is more concentrated, and a wider range of views (within the dominant party or coalition) can be reconciled with lower transaction costs.

> 30 For this reason, hypotheses H04 and H05 for democracy and programmatic parties could also correctly be assigned to the common-pool hypotheses H01 – H03 in the sense that they describe how the common-pool tendency is ameliorated.

> 31 The definition of the variable departs from Keefer (2011) in one small way:  the number of years the party _affiliated with the chief executive_ has existed is used rather than the number of years that the _largest_ political party has existed.  In most cases, this leads to the same results.  Countries also scored as zero include those without political parties, with executives who are not affiliated with political parties, or with executives who have been in power longer than the party they are affiliated with.

> 32 Roubini and Sachs (1989) for example, found a tendency towards larger deficits in governments characterized by short average tenures and coalition governments with a large number of political parties.

> 33 See Beck _et al_ (2001).

> 34 Note:  Since “ _System_ ” is a dummy variable, _Z_ ( _System_ ) is the equivalent of 1– _System_ .

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