Electoral Struggles: The Limits of ‘Political Business Cycle’ and ‘Class-Theoretical’ Analyses

Abstract

The temptation to reduce historically complex and non-repeatable social developments to precise ‘laws’, or to an ‘intrinsic logic’ of long waves, is still very widespread today. Having criticised the new metaphysics of ‘world-system’ theory and long wave theory, let me complete the picture by concentrating on those analyses which either perpetuate economistic notions of ‘the political’, or reduce electoral politics to secondary struggles. All the weaknesses manifest in the division of social life into ‘the State’, ‘Civil Society’ and ‘the Economy’ become particularly evident when analyses are made of elections and their effect on what is called ‘the Economy’. First, a long tradition of bourgeois and Marxian political economy has operated with the concept of a ‘business cycle’ which continually goes up and down at certain intervals. From the ‘business cycle’ we have seen the emergence of larger, transnational cycles known as long waves. At the national level, cyclical theory has manifested itself in the form of the ‘political business cycle’. Second, as most contemporary political economy tends to be far more ‘economic’ than ‘political-economic’, elections have also been partially analysed in ‘class-theoretical’ terms. Within the ‘class-theoretical’ school one can distinguish between strategic, humanist and structuralist analyses of elections.