The Dual Political Legislation Cycle in France

This paper tests the Political Legislation Cycle theory on French data. The theory predicts a peak of legislative production in the pre-electoral period, when the legislator increases voters’ utility in order to be reelected. France is unique in that two elections set up the pace of political life: the presidential and the legislative elections which potentially generate a dual legislation cycle. A hierarchical Poisson model is implemented on a sample containing the monthly legislative production from January 1959 to March 2012. We found that 1) a dual cycle of the production of laws emerges, following both the presidential and the legislative elections, 2) since the constitutional reform of 2000, which synchronized the two elections, the magnitude of the cycle increased, and 3) the President of the Republic does not have an impact on the legislative production, but relies on the government.