The paper surveys the ‘old’ and ‘new’ political macroeconomics. In the former we consider how governments can be seen to manipulate the economy as to satisfy opportunistic or ideological motives, thereby creating opportunistic or partisan political business cycles. We examine how the...

The paper analyses the four principal model types that comprise the political business cycle literature. It then considers how this literature complements the ‘new political macroeconomics’ in analysing the impact of politics on inflation. Political business cycle models can be classified...

Rogoff, 1985, suggested that central bank independence would lead to lower inflation but greater output variability. Alesina and Gatti, 1995, demonstrated Rogoff’s work was partial by only considering economic sources of output variability. By including political factors, circumstances could...