Political business cycles in turkey: a fiscal approach

Political business cycle studies have arisen as alternatives to pure business cycle studies. The studies in the political business cycle area mainly try to answer the question that whether the voters are manipulated in election periods or not. Also, the methods which the politicians use to be re-elected are uncovered. In this paper, we ask the question whether there are opportunistic political business cycles in Turkey or not. Our study focuses on the fiscal policies to discover the Turkish case. We use simple but powerful time series models in ARMA context to discover the relationships between political business cycles and fiscal variables. Empirical results show that there are quite perfect opportunistic political business cycles in Turkey.