An election cycle is defined as the consequence of leaders using economic policy to increase their chances of re-election. Given that in a given country, a favorable economic climate tends to improve the image of the government in power, the latter would tend to implement a stimulus policy before elections.
Economic research on electoral cycles has mainly been conducted by the Public Choice school , based on the work of Nordhaus (1975), who believed that governments increased inflation before elections in order to lower unemployment and thus win the vote.
Nordhaus’s work has been challenged (Alt and Chrystal, 1981) because it does not provide in-depth empirical estimates. Since then, studies on electoral cycles have mainly been based on analyzing public deficits, observing whether or not they increased in the year preceding elections. Most empirical studies (Brender and Drazen (2005), Akhmedov and Zhuravska (2004), Alt and Lassen (2006)) conclude that electoral cycles exist, but that they diminish as institutional rules and transparency measures are put in place.
Electoral cycles are also present at the local level: all other things being equal, according to INSEE, investment increases by an average of 6% in the two years preceding an election and falls by nearly 5% in the two years following it.
Certain electoral cycles have entered everyday language in several countries, particularly in the United States, where the practice of » pork barrel » refers to the construction of infrastructure in a constituency for purely electoral purposes. The Poles, for their part, refer to « kiełbasa wyborcza » (election sausage), an expression used since the 19th century when the country’s political representatives organized picnics with free sausages in order to gain the support of voters.
Nicolas P.
