In the aftermath of the financial crisis, budget deficits returned to the political agenda. This revived an old question as to whether the partisanship of governing parties affects fiscal policy, where the conventional view is that the left tends toward excessive deficits. Though the existing scholarly evidence provides little support for this view, political rhetoric on the British Labour government’s borrowing, or that of SYRIZA in Greece, or other left parties around Europe, attests to its ongoing power. In this paper we seek to address three questions related to this conventional view. First: are the left really perceived by voters as more likely to run budget deficits? This is often assumed but has yet to be demonstrated empirically. We find that it is the case that the left is seen as more likely to run deficits (although in the United States, borrowing expectations are dominated by party identification). Second: does the conventional view have a basis in reality? Updating earlier analyses to include the huge changes in government borrowing in response to the financial crisis, we find that left governments are no more likely to run deficits than right. Finally, we seek to understand what drives the perception of greater debt profligacy on the left: we propose an experimental design.