Aggregating spending preferences: An empirical analysis of party preferences in Norwegian local governments

To understand the role of political parties in public budget making, we need separate data about spending preferences and budgetary outcomes. In this paper we employ such data to discriminate between different models of how competing party preferences are transformed into policy outcomes. In the first step of the analysis data on politicians' spending preferences are used to estimate the desired allocation of each party. In the second step the desired allocations are used as inputs in a separate analysis of the decision-making process in Norwegian local councils.