political business cycle

political business cycle, fluctuation of economic activity that results from an external intervention of political actors. The term political business cycle is used mainly to describe the stimulation of the economy just prior to an election in order to improve prospects of the incumbent government getting reelected. Despite numerous attempts to establish their existence, empirical evidence of political business cycles remains rather equivocal.

(Read Milton Friedman’s Britannica entry on money.)

Expansionary monetary and fiscal policies have politically popular consequences in the short run, such as falling unemployment, economic growth, and benefits from government spending on public services. However, the same policies, especially if pursued to excess, are found to have unpleasant consequences in the long term, such as accelerating inflation and damaging the foreign trade balance. Thus, they can harm the long-term growth potential of the economy. Thought to be rational actors with short-term horizons of calculation, politicians will pursue popular expansionary monetary and fiscal policies immediately before an election. However, being aware of adverse effects of expansionary policies, they will not intend to keep those measures after they get elected. Thus, after the election is over, politicians will often reverse course, which may include cutting spending, slowing the growth of money supply, and allowing interest rates to rise. As a result, the regular holding of elections will produce cyclical fluctuation of economic activity because of recurring patterns of government stimulus and restraint in order to induce an artificial boom in the election time.

Politicians’ rational preference of short-term political concerns over macroeconomic calculation in economic policy making can also affect general monetary and fiscal policy. Politicians will try to drive up the natural or equilibrium rate of employment. Thus, the rate of inflation and interest rates will be higher than they need to be.

Likewise, there is a political cycle found in welfare regimes. Accordingly, the state officials will tend to make the welfare system more generous in the preelection period and to restore restraint and incentives to work afterward.

Nondemocratic leaders also have incentives to allocate budgets and credits to their strategic partners, but, without regular elections, they will have few reasons to engage in opportunistic manipulations of fiscal or monetary policies. However, their time horizons may be shortened by immediate threats to survival, such as war. In general, theorists of the political business cycle believe that democratic politicians will manage monetary and fiscal policy less responsibly than the nondemocratic leaders or politicians in the regimes with less political competition.

The theories of political business cycle are based on several assumptions. First, it is generally agreed by economists that there is a short-term trade-off between the level of utilization and employment in the economy and the rate of inflation. Second, it is assumed that politicians are rational actors, prioritizing their short-term political objectives. In the run-up to elections, they will trade inflation for lower levels of unemployment. Third, those who study the political business cycle often think that there is a single best policy solution in a given situation that is in the general interest. That solution leads to a natural equilibrium between inflation and unemployment. Very often, the understanding of such equilibrium is counterinflational.

There are two streams of theories in the literature on the political business cycle. First, partisan theories stress the difference of fiscal and monetary preferences between parties. Whereas leftist parties are expected to boost real economic activity (employment), rightist parties are thought to focus on fighting inflation. A second set of models concentrate on the manipulation of policy instruments by politicians who seek to get reelected.

According to theorists of political business cycle, political competition systematically affects fiscal and monetary policies in a way that is adverse to the general economic well-being. Governments have policy preferences that are inconsistent with the needs of the economy, and, therefore, they cannot be trusted to deliver appropriate monetary and fiscal policy. If policy credibility is to be achieved, public authorities need to be able to make a monetary and fiscal precommitment that is independent of political competition. To do so would entail changing institutions so that political calculations are removed from monetary policy making. Such a situation can be achieved by an independent central bank constitutionally mandated to deliver a specific inflation target. Advanced capitalist economies have tended to increase the autonomy of the central bank and depoliticize monetary policy.

The trend of depoliticizing monetary policy by making central banks independent of political struggle raises serious concerns about public accountability of respective policy makers. Some people think that moving monetary policy out of the hands of publicly accountable politicians poses a threat to democracy, as it limits the scope of policy that can be pursued by those politicians.

Alberto Alesina, Political Models of Macroeconomic Policy and Fiscal Reforms (1992); Allan Drazen, “The Political Business Cycle After 25 Years,” NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000, pp. 75–138 (2001).