Political Business Cycles in Türkiye: June 2018-May 2023

Abstract

This study analyses political business cycle (PBC) dynamics in an authoratian country, Türkiye, during the period between the June 2018 and May 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections, employing the conditional PBC framework to interpret an institutionally distinctive case. It argues that the transition to the Presidential Government System in 2018 did not merely operate within a weakly constrained environment but actively dismantled the institutional safeguards, central bank independence, parliamentary fiscal oversight, and statistical credibility, that would otherwise have limited electoral economic manipulation. The Turkish case advances the conditional PBC literature by documenting how institutional constraints can be rapidly dismantled through constitutionally sanctioned mechanisms, how financially open economies can temporarily circumvent the trilemma constraint through unorthodox instruments, and how competitive authoritarian settings amplify the electoral returns to pre-election economic manipulation.