Conditional political legislation cycles

Fabio Padovano () and Youssoufa Sy
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Fabio Padovano: ROMA TRE - Università degli Studi Roma Tre = Roma Tre University, CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Youssoufa Sy: CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Erasmus University Rotterdam

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Abstract: The Political Legislation Cycles theory predicts peaks of legislative production before elections, as incumbents adopt vote-maximizing strategies to secure reelection. Like for budget cycles, legislative cycles can be interpreted as quantitative evidence of a dynamic inefficiency in the agency relationship between voters and politicians. This paper presents the first panel test of PLC theory, to identify which institutional features generate this inefficiency, exploiting a newly assembled dataset of the legislative activity of twenty electoral democracies, mainly from 1975 to 2010s. The estimates show that the total number of laws decreases at the beginning of a legislature and significantly increases near its end, generally 6 months before, with magnitudes of the cycles varying across countries. These cross-countries variations appear correlated with electoral systems (PR electoral systems generating cycles 67% greater than majoritarian), government systems, with presidential democracies being characterized by larger cycles especially when governments are divided, and with the degree of fiscal decentralization, with highly decentralized countries showing a legislative cycles 64 % greater. Finally, the level of democracy affects PLC in a nonlinear way. These results provide a quantitative guidance to constitutional reforms aimed at increasing efficiency in the representation of voters' preferences in democracies

Keywords: Political legislation cycles; Economic theory of legislation; Comparative institutional analysis; Negative binomial regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Published in International Review of Law and Economics, 2026, 85, pp.106305. ⟨10.1016/j.irle.2025.106305⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05423986

DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2025.106305

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