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Housing Starts and the Political Business Cycle

University of Connecticut

The political business cycle (PBC) literature has, generally, been characterized by a relatively narrow set of economic variables and by unidirectional causal analysis. I challenge both of these traditional constructions. First, I expand the search by examining a surprisingly understudied component of the political economy: the housing market. As a vital component of the American macroeconomy, housing is an uncharacteristically powerful tool for politicians and political analyses alike. Second, I use vector autoregression to more accurately model the dynamic and reciprocal nature of the economic and political interrelations found in PBCs. I find significant evidence of PBCs in the U.S. housing market from 1959 to 2005.

Key Words: political economy • presidential elections • housing • political business cycle

This version was published on September 1, 2008

American Politics Research, Vol. 36, No. 5, 776-798 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1532673X08319228


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