Conditional Political Cycles in Africa: Myth or Reality?

Christine O Strong

Journal of African Economies, 2024, vol. 33, issue 5, 489-514

Abstract: This study tests for the presence of political cycles in Africa. Through an analysis encompassing data from 30 African nations over the period 1980–2020, we ask whether political incumbents in Africa rely on monetary and fiscal policy variables to improve their reelection prospects. In particular, we test for the existence of ‘conditional political cycles’, namely, we show that both government consumption and money growth go up during an election year, even when we account for critical institutional factors such as government attributes and political regimes. Our findings reveal a noticeable upswing in both government consumption and money growth during election years, a trend that holds consistent even after controlling for key institutional variables. Further exploration, however, unveils that this phenomenon is nuanced, particularly in the case of political monetary cycles; in particular, our analysis shows that when an African country is classified as a democracy during an election year, broad money falls. But although robust institutions can curtail the intensity of political monetary cycles, they do not exert a similar effect on fiscal variables. Finally, we test for the presence of ‘political credit cycles’ and find no empirical evidence that African incumbents manipulate credit markets to bolster their electoral outcomes.

Keywords: political cycles; consumption; elections; Africa; broad money; JEL Classification: 01; E02; H63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejad019 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:33:y:2024:i:5:p:489-514.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().