Electoral Cycles Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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An electoral cycle is the period of time between two elections. Subject to specific electoral laws, electoral cycles are usually four or five years in length. Important components of an electoral cycle are the honeymoon, the period right after the election; the midterm, the period between elections; and the campaign period, or time approaching an election. Very often, governments reach their highest levels of popularity during the honeymoon period, while experiencing a sharp decline in popularity afterward as the campaign period and next election approach. Popularity functions such as these are considered the outcome of an electoral (economic) cycle. Two types of studies have emerged exploring electoral cycles: the first focuses on the effect of the cycle on economic policies, while the second type looks at how economic conditions and performance prior to an election affect electoral outcomes. The latter research strategy has produced a series of forecasting models that are relatively successful in predicting electoral outcomes.

One line of research on electoral cycles examines the variations in government spending at different points in an election cycle. These studies argue that governments introduce popular policies to maximize their electoral support by increasing spending during the campaign period when voters are called to decide on their future. Empirical evidence has confirmed the above hypothesis, suggesting that government spending was increasing during the election year. This conclusion was also confirmed by a series of analyses of various electoral cycles for Western democracies (United States, United Kingdom, and Germany), where governments appeared to target increases in spending (toward specific groups) during election years. However, when controlling for objective measures of economic conditions (e.g., GDP), the results reported above lost their robustness, and other scholars reported a series of results uncovering that government spending was not related to electoral cycles. Finally, another group of scholars reached a conclusion that falls in the middle, arguing that electoral cycles are important but their substantive effects on government spending are relatively small. Thus, there is no wide consensus on the effects of election cycles on economic policies. Different scholars look at different types of budgetary spending, different types of governments, and different periods in time. Unsurprisingly, the reviewed results relied heavily on various sources of heterogeneity.

Another line of research examines the effects of economic conditions on voting behavior. Models of voter accountability suggest that electorates reward or punish government performance based on economic conditions. Incumbents are capable of directly influencing economic conditions and consequently the voters’ well-being. Governments will tend to introduce popular fiscal policies before they enter the campaign to win the election. Following the assumption that voters decide by looking at past performance, incumbent parties will attempt to manipulate the economy to maximize their probability of winning. The theory predicts that objective economic conditions bring about prospective and retrospective evaluations about the state of the economy. This involves sociotropic and egocentric perceptions (i.e., perceptions about the prospective or retrospective general state of the economy and perceptions of personal finances) that mediate final subjective perceptions of the economy. Voters who think that the incumbent has performed well are likely to reward the government responsible for their pocketbook or sociotropic prosperity. Building on that schema, politicians will seek to introduce popular economic policies in the final period of the electoral cycle to sway the electorate with the goal of establishing the feel-good factor among voters to enhance their likelihood of being reelected. This may be accomplished by introducing changes in key economic indicators such as inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and taxation. While the vast majority of the economic voting literature suggests that the economy is the focal determinant of electoral behavior, the importance and the stability of this effect seem to vary across nations and across time.

As a summary, both accounts of the electoral cycle discussed above are building on three foundations. First, incumbent governments are office-seeking actors. Second, they have the ability to manipulate national economic conditions. Finally, they will tend to manipulate the economy based on a long-term electoral cycle strategy. The first line of the reviewed research seeks to explain government spending, assuming that strategic spending is related to specific time points within the electoral cycle. The second group of scholars seeks to explain voting behavior in response to macroeconomic conditions. On these accounts, the electoral cycles are considered given, and researchers seek to find patterns of association between objective and subjective measures of the economy and the actual vote.

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