Conditional Political legislation cycles

Fabio Padovano and Youssoufa Sy
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Youssoufa Sy: University of Rennes, CNRS, CREM - UMR 6211, Condorcet Center for Political Economy, F-35000 Rennes, France; and the European Doctorate in Law and Economics (EDLE), Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Economics Working Paper from Condorcet Center for political Economy at CREM-CNRS from Condorcet Center for political Economy

Abstract: The Political Legislation Cycles (henceforth, PLC) theory predicts peaks of legislative production before elections, as incumbents adopt vote-maximizing strategies to secure reelection. Like for budget cycles, the presence of 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 the institutional features that contribute to this inefficiency. The test exploits a brand-new dataset including the legislative activity of 19 countries, mainly from 1975 to the 2010s. The estimates show that the total number of laws decreases by 14% at the beginning of a new legislature and increases roughly by 40% near its end, when elections are held at the expected time. The magnitude of this cycle increases by 55 percentage points in PR electoral systems compared to majoritarian ones, by 45 percentage points in parliamentary governments compared to presidential ones and by at least 9 percentage points in countries with a degree of decentralization higher than the average. Finally, the level of democracy affects the PLC in a nonlinear way.

Keywords: Political legislation cycles; Economic theory of legislation; Comparative institutional analysis; Negative binomial regression. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C49 D72 H19 H61 H62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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