Not All Elections Are Alike: The Institutional Determinants ofPolitical Business Cycles Open Access

Abstract

Abstract Not All Elections Are Alike: The Institutional Determinants of Political Business Cycles By Pascael L. Barclay Since the 1970s, scholars have struggled to resolve the theoretical and empirical debates regarding the existence and nature of political business cycles or PBCs. PBCs occur when incumbents alter fiscal policies around election time to improve their reelection chances. Despite many advancements, scholars still have only a rudimentary understanding of how and if PBCs occur in all dictatorships and across regime types. This thesis undertakes two multivariate tests of PBCs. The first employs a new dataset of 134 dictatorships from 1960 to 2000 and focuses on the effects of electoral characteristics. The second uses a worldwide sample of democracies and autocracies from 1960 to 2000 and concentrates on the effects of party structure and regime type. I find weak evidence of institutions' effects on PBCs in both tests. Nonetheless, these findings provide valuable insight into the general nature of electoral politics in dictatorships and provide evidence that PBCs are not a cross-national phenomenon.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 1 2. Literature Review 3 2.1 PBCs in EA Regimes 5 2.2 PBCs across Regime Types 10 2.3 Summary 11 3. Institutional Determinants of PBCs 12

3.1 Hypotheses 15 4. Data and Methodology for Hypotheses 1-3 22 4.1 Dependent Variables 23 4.2 Independent Variables 25 4.3 Methodology 28 5. Results for Hypotheses 1-3 28 5.1 Robustness Checks 30 6. Data and Methodology for Hypotheses 4 and 5 32 6.1 Dependent Variables 32 6.2 Independent Variables 32 6.3 Methodology 34 7. Results for Hypotheses 4 and 5 35 7.1 Robustness Checks 36 8. Conclusion 38 Bibliography 43 List of Tables 1. Elections in EA Dataset 23 2. Summary Statistics for EA Data 28 3. Results: Electoral Authoritarian Regimes 29 4. Robustness Check: EA Regimes- Post-Election Year Effects 31

5. Robustness Check: EA Regimes- No Control Variables 32 6. Summary Statistics for All Regimes Data 34 7. Results: All Regimes- Presidential Elections 35 8. Results: All Regimes- Legislative Elections 36 9. Robustness Check: All Regimes- All Elections 36 10. Robustness Check: All Regimes- Post-Election Year Effects 37 11. Robustness Check: All Regimes- No Control Variables 38

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Political Science
Degree	MA
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Political Science, General
Keyword	Political Business Cycles Dictatorships
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Gandhi, Jennifer, Emory University
Committee Members	Tworzecki, Hubert, Emory University Reinhardt, Eric, Emory University

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