Społeczne oceny działalności polskich rządów w latach 2002–2012 w świetle modelu uwzględniającego umiejętności i karierę polityka

Modeling social and political behavior of economic agents is currently one of the major areas of interest for economists around the world. New political economics models attempt to explain non-market policies, collective and political behavior of individual agents or organizations. The career concern model, described in the paper, belongs to a broad group of principal-agent models. It shows how voters evaluate competences of politicians on the basis of their past actions and expectations of their future behavior. Competence is the key feature in the model and it depends on provision of public goods, politician rent and tax. During elections, voters try to choose the most competent politician. The aim of the paper is to verify empirically the significance of the determinants indicated in the theoretical model. We test data on social evaluation of Polish governments’ activity, published in the years 2002-2012 by CBOS. Most of the explanatory variables are derived from reports on execution of the state budget published by the Ministry of Finance. We use a linear regression model to estimate signifi cance of selected explanatory variables. It is found that the variables that have statistically significant impact on the positive social evaluation of Polish governments’ activity are: spending on salaries, aggregated expenditures on public goods less general subsidies, and effective tax rate of PIT. The strongest relationship is observed for state-funded salaries. The other two variables have a minor impact on the evaluation of Polish governments’ activity.