Politics and Business Cycles in Industrial Democracies

Politics Alberto Alesina Influences from political competition on macroeconomic policy are often thought to be a source of economic fluctuations. Politicians are described as being driven by two, not mutually exclusive, main motivations: they want to be reelected and they harbour political, or ideological, biases. When such theories are confronted with actual cycles in a number of industrial countries, the pattern of inflation, unemployment, output, and budget deficits indicates that partisan policy making is a fairly widespread phenomenon, with more limited evidence that electoral preoccupations result in major fluctuations. The combination of partisanship and electoral cycles may easily result in socially undesirable outcomes. In particular the degree of politico-institutional stability and the independence of the Central Bank have a bearing on macroeconomic outcomes. These observations raise a number of important questions about the design of political institutions.