Elections and the tax structure in the post-socialist EU member states

Abstract

The article deals with the political business cycle theory, especially with effects of the term of parliamentary elections on the tax composition (direct versus indirect taxes). It includes a traditional political business cycle analysis evaluating the effects of elections on overall revenues. We use panel data regression analysis, namely fixed effects method with robust option and GMM dynamic panel data estimator to analyse the relationship between tax structure and elections. The analysis includes panel data of tax revenues divided to GDP from 11 post-socialist EU member States in time-period from 1996 to 2014, our models contain 209 observations. Using this data, we found out that political business cycle does not have any effect on direct tax revenues, however there is a minimal impact on indirect tax revenues (0.25% GPD). In election years, there is a decrease of indirect revenues by less than 2 per cent. Furthermore, our models did not identify the influence of post-election effects in observed timeline.