Do fiscal rules dampen the political business cycle?

This paper develops and tests the theory that fiscal rules limit politicians' ability to manipulate the budget for electoral gain. Using panel data from the American states, I find evidence suggesting that stringent balanced budget rules dampen the political business cycle. That is, while spending rises before and falls after elections in states that can carry deficits into the next fiscal year, this pattern does not exist in states with strict “no-carry” rules. Neither binding gubernatorial term limits nor the partisan composition of government appear to significantly affect the magnitude of the political business cycle.     

Intervention analysis of electoral tax cycle: The case of Japan

This paper analyzed the impact of elections on tax policy in Japan using an ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average)-intervention analysis from 1953 through 1992. We used discretionary tax revenues, which means the changes in tax receipts attributable to changes in the tax code, rather than automatic tax revenues due to business cycles in the economy. The result of this study shows that there is a political tax cycle in Japan. That is, discretionary tax revenues decrease with a statistically significant amount in a year immediately before elections for the House of Representatives. This may be due to the fact that election timings in Japan with a parliamentary system become endogenous.     

The rational timing of parliamentary elections

This paper presents a rational choice model for the timing of parliamentary elections in political systems where the government has the option of calling an early election. The optimal timing of elections involves the government weighing the benefits of calling an election versus the costs and is modelled mathematically as an optimal stopping problem. The model implies that the timing of elections depends upon time left in the government's term, the degree of electoral uncertainty, the volatility of government popularity, the government's time rate of discount, and institutional constraints such as the length of term and whether the government is likely to be forced from power by a vote of no confidence.     

Evolutionary voter sophistication and political business cycles

The concept of the sophisticated electorate is central to many contemporary political economic models. However, no existing studies have yet clarified how voters could develop a sophisticated way of evaluating economic performance. This study suggests a transitional hypothesis that removes the constraint that voters have prior knowledge about the macroeconomic environment and the true economic intent of the incumbent government. The hypothesis permits behavioral innovation from learning and predicts that the evolutionary process toward sophistication may be triggered by socially suboptimal political business cycles that reveal the self-serving characteristic of the government. The empirical analyses using recent Japanese experiences show that Japanese political support behavior shifted from naivete to sophistication in the early 1970s after political manipulation occurred in the 1969 and 1972 parliamentary elections.     

Spain’s Catalan separatist crisis

Catalonia’s 1 October referendum on independence precipitated a major political crisis in Spain and prompted Madrid to assume direct rule of Catalonia pending regional elections scheduled for 21 December. There appears to be a realistic possibility that Catalan voters will opt for a less disruptive push for enhanced autonomy within Spain. But if they re-assert independence, the cycle witnessed over the past several months could repeat and produce deeper crisis.     

If Immigrants Could Vote in the UK: A Thought Experiment with Data from the 2015 General Election

The distribution of voting rights in the UK is an artefact of history rather than a product of clear legal or philosophical principles. Consequently, some resident aliens (i.e. immigrants) have the right to vote in all UK elections; others can vote in local elections but are excluded from national elections; still others are excluded from all elections. In England and Wales alone, roughly 2.3 million immigrants are excluded from voting in national elections. This exclusion is inconsistent with the founding principle of democracy and distorts political discourse. What if all immigrants could vote in national elections? We estimate that up to ninety‐five parliamentary seats could have been won by a different party in the 2015 general election. More substantially, enfranchising all immigrants would require re‐drawing UK constituency boundaries. The new electoral map would increase the relative power of urban constituencies and would incentivise some political entrepreneurs and parties to temper anti‐immigration rhetoric.     

A commentary on “Does the Fed contribute to a political business cycle?”

Abrams and Iossifov (2006) find that during 1957–2004, monetary policy turned significantly more expansionary prior to U.S. presidential elections when the Federal Reserve chairman and the incumbent president belonged to the same political party. However, their long sample period obscures changes in trends during the period stemming from advances in macroeconomic theory and in the implementation of monetary policy. Indeed, when one considers only the Volcker–Greenspan era (1979–2004), there is insufficient evidence to accept the notion of a political business cycle effect.     

Barometer elections in comparative perspective

This paper develops a conceptual framework for studying the performance of the government in what we term ‘barometer elections’. Barometer elections are defined as elections that reflect changes in citizens' attitudes toward the government in response to changing political and economic conditions, absent the opportunity to install a new executive. We classify British by-elections and German Land elections as barometer elections and test a general model that incorporates the electoral cycle; public opinion toward the government; economic conditions; and previous performance as determinants of election outcomes. Considering both short-term and long-term changes in public attitudes and economic performance in the empirical analysis, we find that barometer election outcomes can be explained with a similar set of independent variables across systems.     

Did the fed raise interest rates before elections?

Public Choice - The literature on political business cycles focuses on elected incumbents and neglects the incentives of appointed officials. We present evidence of rate hikes before elections when...     

Timing Is Everything? Primacy and Recency Effects in Voter Mobilization Campaigns

The timing of message delivery in political campaigns is a key component of strategy. Yet studies that examine the impact of message timing on political behavior are surprisingly rare. Although one recent study finds that appeals delivered closer to Election Day will be most effective (Nickerson, American Journal of Political Science 51(2):269–282, 2007), methodological considerations render this conclusion tentative and suggest the impact of message timing remains an open question. In this paper I report the results of a randomized field experiment designed to compare the mobilization effects of nonpartisan messages delivered via commercial phone banks at different points during a campaign cycle. The results of the experiment, conducted during the November 2005 municipal elections in Rochester, New York, suggest calls delivered early on during a campaign cycle can also be effective.     

Turnout in Germany in the course of time: Life cycle and cohort effects on electoral turnout from 1953 to 2049

The steadily rising share of older voters could lead to them gaining an ever increasing level of political representation compared to younger voters not only because of the imbalance of numbers between the young and the old, but also because turnout rates among the old have always been above-average. The latter argument only applies if the so-called life cycle effect is assumed to be dominant. However, diverse socialisation backgrounds, captured by the cohort effect, also have to be taken into account. It is also unclear what the interplay of these two effects of time implies for future aggregate turnout. Focusing on the German case, we base our analyses on the Repräsentative Wahlstatistik (Representative Electoral Statistic, RES) and population forecasts to estimate consequences of the demographic shifts for all federal elections from 1953 until today, as well as for future elections. First, we calculate life cycle, cohort and period effects on turnout for previous elections by using cohort analysis; second, we apply these net effects to the future age distribution under certain assumptions concerning life cycle and cohort effects. Our results show that the recent decline in turnout is in particular due to negative period effects and (in West Germany) to a minor extent also due to consequences of cohort replacement, whereas changes in the age structure have had a positive effect on turnout since 1990 in both parts of Germany. Additionally, our forecasts suggest that turnout rates will decline and that the over-representation of the old will continue until around 2030 and diminish afterwards in a 'greying' population.     

The UN's election gamble in Libya

Talks in Paris on Libya last month set a date of 10 December for parliamentary and presidential elections, which the United Nations hopes will subdue the civil war. But due to pervasive disputes between the Operation Dignity and Libya Dawn political factions, and tensions within each, elections could prove infeasible. Even if elections go ahead, it is possible that Libya Dawn could lose and refuse to accept the results.     

Second-order elections

Abstract The composition of the directly elected European Parliament does not precisely reflect the 'real' balance of political forces in the European Community. As long as the national political systems decide most of what there is to be decided politically, and everything really important, European elections are additional national second-order elections. They are determined more by the domestic political cleavages than by alternatives originating in the EC, but in a different way than if nine first-order national elections took place simultaneously. This is the case because European elections occur at different stages of the national political systems' respective 'electoral cycles'. Such a relationship between a second-order arena and the chief arena of a political system is not at all unusual. What is new here, is that one second-order political arena is related to nine different first-order arenas. A first analysis of European election results satisfactorily justifies the assumption mat European Parliament direct elections should be treated as nine simultaneous national second-order elections.     

Rigging elections with violence

In most developing countries even today, political parties spend a substantial fraction of their resources in attracting voters through ideological exhortation as well as force. In this paper we present a model of political contest between two parties that compete in two distinct arenas though the goal of the contest in both arenas is the same-to garner more political support. In the first, which we call “ideological”, the contest involves no use of force. In the second, which we call “conflictual”, party activists use violence either to force ideological supporters of the competing party to vote in their favor or restrain them from voting. We show that a party with lower initial political support will resort to more political violence, ceteris paribus and as the fraction of undecided voters goes up, elections will tend to be less conflictual. We also show that if there is an incumbency advantage, then the resources devoted to creating political unrest increase in equilibrium and political competition is more violent. We also provide some historic and journalistic evidence that supports our results.     

Voter turnout in presidential primaries: A cross-sectional examination

Decades of individual and aggregate level research suggest that three sets of factors influence voter turnout: the socioeconomic makeup of the potential voter; legal restrictions on voting; and the political context of each election. In this brief study, we use state-level data to test whether these factors combine to account for variations in turnout rates in the electoral arena of presidential primaries. As expected, high turnout is associated with states which have high median levels of education, lenient legal restrictions on voting, and a history of competitive two-party elections. Also congruent with our expectations, but at odds with research of other electoral arenas, high turnout in presidential primaries is unrelated to high campaign spending or close elections. We contend that spending in presidential primaries may be simply too low to stimulate turnout and that close primaries do not enhance turnout because voters are often unaware that the pending election will be close.The names of the authors appear in alphabetical order and imply that this study is in every way a collaborative enterprise.     

Technocratic attitudes and voting behaviour ten years after the Eurozone crisis: Evidence from the 2019 EP elections

The onset of the Great Recession raised the profile of technocracy, or government by experts, as a contrasting model to democracy. Yet, there is little research on how attitudes towards technocracy may impact European citizens' political behaviour. Moreover, the consistency of technocracy supporters' political attitudes, especially towards the EU, is questionable. This paper uses new survey panel data collected before and after the European parliament elections in May 2019 in six countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain). We investigate how citizens’ technocratic attitudes affect their voting behaviour in the European elections. We find evidence that citizens with technocratic attitudes are less likely to support mainstream parties, and tend to either abstain or, if they vote, to give their vote to anti-system parties, especially from the populist right. In addition, by distinguishing technocracy supporters according to their partisanship, we conclude that technocracy is a thin ideology that can be combined with different patterns of political support: while many technocracy supporters have no party identification or support non-mainstream parties and show dissatisfaction with democracy and the EU, another subgroup of technocracy supporters identifies with a mainstream political party and show above average political support and support for the EU.     

Do opportunistic snap elections affect political trust? Evidence from a natural experiment

Snap elections, those triggered by incumbents in advance of their original date in the electoral calendar, are a common feature of parliamentary democracies. In this paper, I ask: do snap elections influence citizens’ trust in the government? Theoretically, I argue that providing citizens with an additional means of endorsing or rejecting the incumbent – giving voters a chance to ‘have their say’ – can be interpreted by citizens as normatively desirable and demonstrative of the incumbent's desire to legitimise their agenda by (re)-invigorating their political mandate. Leveraging the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May's, shock announcement of early elections in April 2017 with the fieldwork for the Eurobarometer survey, I demonstrate that the announcement of snap elections had a sizeable and significant positive effect on political trust. This trust-inducing effect is at odds with the observed electoral consequences of the 2017 snap elections. Whilst incumbent-triggered elections can facilitate net gains for the sitting government, May's 2017 gamble cost the Conservative Party their majority. Snap elections did increase political trust. These trust-inducing effects were not observed symmetrically for all citizens. Whilst Eurosceptics and voters on the right of the ideological spectrum – those most inclined to support the incumbent May-led Conservative government in 2017 – became more trusting, no such changes in trust were observed amongst left-wing or non-Eurosceptic respondents. This study advances the understanding of a relatively understudied yet not uncommon political phenomenon, providing causal evidence that snap elections have implications for political trust.     

Remote Electronic Voting: Free,Fair and Secret?

Most of the debate surrounding remote electronic voting has focused on technical issues such as security and feasibility. This article examines the equally important issue of whether voting outside the context of the supervised polling place meets the legal and normative standards required of democratic elections. Our conclusion is that if voting that takes place in an unsupervised context, it is virtually impossible to guarantee that it will be carried out in secret, and that lack of secrecy constitutes a serious violation of the principles of freeness and fairness that govern elections in democratic states. This argument also has implications for postal voting, which are discussed in brief.     

Governments,trade unions and the macroeconomy: An expository analysis of the political business cycle

We have briefly reviewed the state of the art of research on the political business cycle in the context of a simple textbook model of the macroeconomy. It has been demonstrated that the government-generated political business cycle vanishes as expectations turn rational. Even then, however, non-inflationary policies apparently are time inconsistent. Hence, democracies seem to be stuck with some sort of inflationary bias.Countries with fairly centralized wage bargaining and strong labor unions have to deal with a second political source of instability in the macroeconomy: if the labor union's program contains political items such as equal educational opportunities for working class children, extended co-determination, a more equal distribution of wealth, and the like, they will prefer to see those parties in power who show the best prospects of implementing those items. So the trade union's wage bargaining strategies take into account how bargaining results influence the state of the economy and, hence, the reelection prospects of the ruling government — and they will do so in different ways, depending on whether the union prefers the government to the opposition party or vice versa.     

Raising the Threshold,Fighting Fragmentation? Mechanical and Psychological Effects of the Legal Electoral Threshold in Belgium

Many proportional representation systems are characterised by a legal electoral threshold. Such a threshold reserves the allocation of seats for those parties that reach a minimum share of the votes. In order to fight fragmentation, a 5 per cent threshold has been introduced for both federal and regional elections in Belgium. This article seeks to explore the mechanical and psychological effects of this legal threshold after five elections. It is shown that the threshold has had limited mechanical and psychological effects on voters but some psychological effects on party elites. Moreover, while in the short term the average number of lists dropped and several pre-electoral coalitions formed, in the longer term the legal threshold has not prevented further fragmentation.