Working Papers
Political Responsibility for Different Crises
Large-scale economic crises are associated not only with economic downturns, but also with political turnover. In this paper, we study the impact of different types of crises such as sovereign and domestic defaults, banking crises, economic recessions on political turnover of the top politicians: heads of the state and central bank governors. According to our findings, only default on domestic debt increases the probability of politician’s turnover but not the default on external debt. Which, as we argue, is due to the fact that the later is not directly felt by the voters. In addition we find that although currency crises increase chances of head of central bank turnover it does not affect tenure of head of the state. Presumably, this is the case since currency crises is in the area of responsibility of the CB governor in public eyes.