Images of the ‘Floating Voter’: Or, the ‘Political Business Cycle’ Revisited

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Abstract
This paper interprets the British government's failure to achieve better control of the business cycle, not in terms of technical inefficiency, but as a politically rational pursuit of a class of ‘floating voters' perceived by it to change their economic priorities according to the variable which is currently ‘in crisis’. It then investigates whether this perception is accurate, and finds broadly in the affirmative in spite of a growing salience of inflation over time, on the strength of Gallup poll data from 1953–75. The finding of previous studies that government popularity declines cyclically between elections is interpreted in terms of its greater discretion in matters of economic (and other) policy variables in the mid-term, and the hypothesis is put forward that a more economically informed electorate might ipso facto have less unstable preferences.