The Political Business Cycle At Sixty: Towards A Neo-Kaleckian Understanding Of Political Economy

Sixty years ago, Kalecki (1943) introduced the notion of a political business cycle to the economics discipline, emphasising that individual economic interest affected not only that person's political behaviour but also overall economic growth. Since then, an extensive and remarkably heterogeneous literature has developed that is unified in its attempt to encourage an interdisciplinary analysis of economic problems and distributive questions and to integrate the non-market branch of political economy with the rest of the discipline. By critically surveying the insights that economists have won since, this article attempts to place into a broader context those recent innovations in politico-economic research that have picked up on Kalecki's understanding of personal conflict as the key explanation for political behaviour and economic growth-foreshadowing the development of a positively formulated economic theory of politics that is able to fully incorporate the decision-making processes of voters, parties, and governments into those of consumers and firms