Political Business Cycles and Russian Elections, or the Manipulations of ‘Chudar’

Daniel Treisman and Vladimir Gimpelson

British Journal of Political Science, 2001, vol. 31, issue 2, 225-246

Abstract: Political business cycle theories tend to focus on one policy instrument or macroeconomic lever at a time. Efforts to find empirical evidence of opportunistic business cycles have turned up rather meagre results. We suggest that these facts may be related. If ways of manipulating the economy to win votes are thought of as substitutes, with changing relative costs, one would expect rational policy makers to switch between them in different periods as costs change. We illustrate this argument with a discussion of Russia. In Russia, four nationwide votes have been held since 1993. We deduce the set of policies that a rational, behind-the-scenes strategist – the ‘Chudar’ of the title – would recommend to an incumbent who believes the voters to vote retrospectively. We show that the expectations are borne out closely in the actual macroeconomic data.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

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:cup:bjposi:v:31:y:2001:i:02:p:225-246_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in British Journal of Political Science from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().