AN AGENDA PAPER Political Business Cycles and the Process of Economic

Political business cycle models of economic policymaking have been welcomed by both political scientists and economists. They improve on economic approaches by explicitly modeling a political component (the electoral incentive) in the economic policymaking process. And they improve on previous political science work by supplanting the case study-dominated institutional literature with a highly abstract, quantitative method. More than a decade’s empirical work on these models has shown that early versions abstracted too radically from the details of political institutions and processes, and various ad hoc reformulations, have sought to improve the theory’s explanatory power. This article reviews the political business cycle literature, placing it into the perspective of the trade-off between parsimonious, nomothetic approaches and more detailed, contex-tualized approaches to policy studies. On the basis of this review, an alternative model of the economic policymaking process is proposed and outlined. Extreme and attaching always the difficulty of fixing at a hundred points the place where one’s impelled bonhomme may feel enough and &dquo;know&dquo; enough-or be in the way of learning enough-for his maximum dramatic value without feeling and knowing too much for his minimum verisimilitude, his proper fusion with the fable. —Henry James The Princess Casamassima Over the last decade and a half, political business cycle models have become the new orthodoxy in academic studies of economic policymaking. Motivated by the supposition that politicians manipulate economic policy instruments to enhance their elec-toral chances, these &dquo;political economy&dquo; models claim to supplant Author’s Note: Lorraine M. McDonnell and several anonymous referees provided helpful advice on earlier versions of this article