Poul Erik Mouritzen: Den politiske cyklus. Århus: Politica, 1991, 660 pp.

The theory of public expenditures is stuck between the formal modelling of the main stream economics framework and the empiricist mode of conducting political science comparisons of unit variations at various levels of government. Whereas the former approach is model driven, using the empirical information in order to validate mathematical equations, the latter approach is data orientated, maximizing the number of variables and cases to be included in research. The economics modelling easily results in empty elegance without foundation in the real world, whereas the political science search for relevant information is endless and erratic. Is there a new balance between theory and data worth aiming at here?

Danish political scientist Poul Erik Mouritzen takes the field of public expenditure explanation a few steps ahead in his impressive Ph.D thesis. What he shows it that the myriad of data about local government policies may be understood by taking a number of middle range steps at the level of theory. Some aspects of the large public sector area of local government spending may be interpreted by means of the classical demographic approach in the Dye-Danziger-Newton tradition. Other aspects require the new theoretical tools of the public choice approach. Actually, all the paraphernalia of local government policy-making become alive if we are open-minded in the choice of the theoretical language. The conduct of public expenditure analysis has to be based on a pragmatic epistemology.

Using some 660 pages, Mouritzen presents an overview of the debate about public spending interpretation and also engages in a number of well-grounded empirical analyses. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies are reported upon. Looking on the public sector as involving both a demand side in the electorate and its principals as well as a supply side with a number of agents looking after their narrow self-interests, Mouritzen shows that the familiar phenomenon of fiscal stress underlies the explanatory power of demand side factors and restricts the impact of supply side factors. This is a brilliant finding.

Mouritzen moves easily between demand side and supply side variables. Explaining the between local government variation in levels of policy efforts in a number of local government programmes by means of demand factors, he employs supply factors to interpret the over time variation in the growth rates of these programmes over a time period, viz. 1982-6. His main finding is that there is a political business cycle in the local government household as it operates over an election cycle. If the public choice models are highly contested, rejecting the unclear notion of a public interest existing as it were besides all the interests of the participating actors, then it is worth emphasizing that such a controversial model as the political business cycle has been corroborated at the local government level. It has been applied with varying success in the modelling of national government level data.

Den politiske cyklus is informative in several respects. It should be rewritten in
order to be published in English, in particular cut back to normal book size as it

would enrich the international debate which cannot employ such a peculiar language
as Danish. As a matter of fact, this would have happened had the book not been
published as a Danish Ph.D. thesis as this format is also much too much a peculiarity.