State budget outcomes and Australian state politics revisited: The impact of parties

This research note reviews work by Gerritscn on budget outputs in Australian States, and more specifically on the explanatory significance of Labor and non‐Labor parties in office. It also extends his work by introducing a comparative dimension across time. This consists of comparison of the findings for the period Gerritsen saidied (1979/80–1982/83) with a later period (1985/86–1987/88) to assess the impact of partisan change in Slate governments on their relative budget efforts. The findings offer more support for the partisanship hypothesis than Gerritsen's allowed, by virtue of the findings for Western Australia and Tasmania. It concludes that though budget efforts are structured by a number of factors, partisanship nevertheless appears a potent explanatory variable.