Conditional political legislation cycles

Abstract

The Political Legislation Cycles theory predicts peaks of legislative production before elections, as incumbents adopt vote-maximizing strategies to secure reelection. Like for budget cycles, legislative cycles can be interpreted as quantitative evidence of a dynamic inefficiency in the agency relationship between voters and politicians. This paper presents the first panel test of PLC theory, to identify which institutional features generate this inefficiency, exploiting a newly assembled dataset of the legislative activity of twenty electoral democracies, mainly from 1975 to 2010s. The estimates show that the total number of laws decreases at the beginning of a legislature and significantly increases near its end, generally 6 months before, with magnitudes of the cycles varying across countries. These cross-countries variations appear correlated with electoral systems (PR electoral systems generating cycles 67% greater than majoritarian), government systems, with presidential democracies being characterized by larger cycles especially when governments are divided, and with the degree of fiscal decentralization, with highly decentralized countries showing a legislative cycles 64% greater. Finally, the level of democracy affects PLC in a nonlinear way. These results provide a quantitative guidance to constitutional reforms aimed at increasing efficiency in the representation of voters’ preferences in democracies • First test of the political legislation cycle thelory in a comparative setting • First analysis of how different institutional frameworks (government systems, electoral rules, levels of decentralization and levels of democracy) affect the political legislation cycle, a quantitative measure of lack of electoral accountability • New comparable dataset of legislative production for 20 countroes for a time interval from 1975 till 2020 (for most countries)