This paper employs an event-study methodology to calculate the impact of 148 elections and 542 budgets on the long-term interest rates of nineteen countries. Both events resolve uncertainty in markets. Elections reveal information about the distribution of political power and budgets reveal information about economic policy. On average both events reduce the interest rate by a similar amount. Very little of the variation is explained by economic variables, even in the case of budgets. By contrast, political constraints help explain the impact of both elections and budgets. Consensual institutions mean that elections do not determine the distribution of power and that the government cannot expect its budget proposal to be accepted virtually unamended by parliament. Thus, political events do not tend to reduce the interest rate in consensual countries. The average impact of budgets and elections is very close in all but two of our nineteen countries. Shifts to the right in elections are rewarded with large and sustained drops in the interest rate. However, there is no difference in the impact of budgets presented by right and left-wing governments and austere budgets do not have a noticeable impact on markets.