Political business cycles and consolidated budget expenditures in Turkey (the analysis of general elections at period of 1950-2000)

Economic performance has always been an important criterion from voters' point of view to evaluate the performance of the government. For this reason, governments that come to power through democratic elections usually have incentives to manipulate the economy through fiscal and monetary policies to create a favorable economic environment for their supporters. So, manipulations of economy with monetary and fiscal policies before election in order to be reelected is called as populism or political business cycles. Hence, the political business cycle models assume that the incumbent follow expansionary policies just before the elections and reverse the trend after the elections in order to smooth the negative effects of preelection budget deficit. This master thesis aims to find out that if incumbent governments applied populist policies concerned with the consolidated budget expenditures prior to general elections to increase their chances of reelection during the 1950 and 2000 period in Turkey. So, the statistical and empirical analysis yielded results that generally support the validity of views in this thesis. Key words ; Election and economy, Political Business Cycles, Economic Populism, Elections, Governmental Politics.