Does the Risk or Realization of a Federal Election Precipitate Canadian Output Growth? – revised version: Does the Expectation or Realization of a Federal Election Precipitate Canadian Output Growth?

This paper asks whether Canadian data is consistent with political opportunism, partisanship and/or political competition effects on real output growth since Confederation. Using data from the 1870 to 2005 time period, we find support for an electoral cycle only if actual election dates are replaced with the predicted election hazard (generated by from a Cox-proportional hazard model) in the test. On the other hand, we find strong evidence for the existence of partisan cycles in the data and mixed evidence with respect to whether changes in the degree of political competition have affected real output growth. Evidence in favour of such an effect arises only in more recent times, from 1924 onwards.