Impact of the UK general elections on total government expenditure cycles: theory and evidence

This paper presents a testable theoretical framework that extends the standard demand-side approach to modeling government expenditure on goods and services. The focus is on the adjustment of expenditure to disequilibria: we investigate whether the adjustment of UK exhaustive government expenditure between 1966 and 2002 to its long-run equilibrium path is symmetric. The evidence points to asymmetric adjustment to the demands of a representative voter over the election cycle but not between Labour and Conservative governments. Convergence to equilibrium is found to be faster during the later stages of each election cycle