How effective are political cycles in the UK in the micro-level?

Georgios Melios

December 2020
 

The role of political budget cycles and their relative electoral ineffectiveness of fiscal instruments for re-election purposes, is long recognised empirical puzzle in political economy. Recent evidence suggest that by shifting the analysis from the macro to the micro-level which accounts for individual-level heterogeneity in electoral responses, one can gain better insights of this puzzling relationship. In this paper, I use data from the Understanding Society survey (2009-2019) to explore whether political budget cycles in the UK work in the micro-level particularly in the era of austerity. Results show that using parliamentary data on dierent categories of spending in education, environmental regulations and education, pre-electoral spending does not significantly increases the probability of voting incumbents in this microeconomic investigation in the UK context.
 

Read the paper