Vote Buying or (Political) Business (Cycles) as Usual?

Toke Aidt; Zareh Asatryan; Lusine Badalyan; Friedrich Heinemann

doi:10.1162/rest_a_00820

Vote Buying or (Political) Business (Cycles) as Usual?

Toke Aidt¹; Zareh Asatryan²; Lusine Badalyan³; Friedrich Heinemann⁴

¹ University of Cambridge and CESifo, Munich · ² ZEW Mannheim · ³ University of Giessen · ⁴ ZEW Mannheim and University of Heidelberg

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2020 open access

We report robust evidence of a new short-run monetary election cycle: the monthly growth rate of the money supply (M1) around elections is higher than in other months in a sample of low- and middle-income countries. We hypothesize this is related to systemic vote buying. Consistent with this, we find no cycle in authoritarian countries and countries with strong political institutions and a pronounced cycle in elections where international election monitors reported vote buying or in close elections. Using survey data on daily consumer expenditures, we show that within-household consumption of food increases in the days before elections.

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00820
Volume: 102 (3)
Pages: 409-425
Language: en
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