IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tky/fseres/99cf39.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

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

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Treisman

    (University of California, Los Angeles and Hoover Institution)

  • Vladimir Gimpelson

    (Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo and IMEMO)

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 meager 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 born out closely in the actual macroeconomic data.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Treisman & Vladimir Gimpelson, 1999. "Political Business Cycles and Russian Elections, or the Manipulations of Chudar," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-39, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
    • Handle: RePEc:tky:fseres:99cf39
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cirje.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/research/dp/99/cf39/contents.htm
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Koen Schoors & Konstantin Sonin, 2005. "Passive Creditors," International Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 8(1), pages 57-86, March.
    2. Blessing Chiripanhura & Miguel Niño‐Zarazúa, 2015. "Aid, Political Business Cycles and Growth in Africa," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(8), pages 1387-1421, November.
    3. World Bank, 2003. "The Russian Labor Market : Moving from Crisis to Recovery," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 15007, December.
    4. Holger Kachelein & Endrit Lami & Drini Imami, 2011. "Election-Related Cycles in Publicly Supplied Goods in Albania," South-Eastern Europe Journal of Economics, Association of Economic Universities of South and Eastern Europe and the Black Sea Region, vol. 9(1), pages 13-25.
    5. Paul Mosley & Blessing Chiripanhura, 2016. "The African Political Business Cycle: Varieties of Experience," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 52(7), pages 917-932, July.
    6. Jula, Dorin, 2008. "Economic Impact of Political Cycles – The Relevance of European experinces for Romania," Working Papers of Institute for Economic Forecasting 081101, Institute for Economic Forecasting.
    7. Peter Kukuk & Adam Gersl, 2011. "Political Pressure on the National Bank of Slovakia," Working Papers IES 2011/29, Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies, revised Sep 2011.
    8. Asad Alam & Mamta Murthi & Ruslan Yemtsov & Edmundo Murrugarra & Nora Dudwick & Ellen Hamilton & Erwin Tiongson, 2005. "Growth, Poverty and Inequality : Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 7287, December.
    9. Lami, Endrit & Imami, Drini & Kächelein, Holger, 2016. "Fuelling political fiscal cycles by opportunistic privatization in transition economies: The case of Albania," Economic Systems, Elsevier, vol. 40(2), pages 220-231.
    10. Fi̇li̇z Eryilmaz & Mehmet Mercan, 2015. "Political Budget Cycles: Evidence From Turkey," Annals - Economy Series, Constantin Brancusi University, Faculty of Economics, vol. 2, pages 5-14, April.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tky:fseres:99cf39. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CIRJE administrative office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ritokjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.