subsequent leaders had to make sure they had a majority in the Politburo for
any policy. It was by winning the fight for control of the Politburo that Yuri
Andropov became undisputed leader of the country in 1982, and it was
MikhailGorbachev’spower base in the Politburo that enabled him to launch
the political restructuring (seeglasnost andperestroika) that ultimately
caused the demise of the entire CPSU. Although officially a party body rather
than a constitutional organ of state, the party and the state were so intertwined
that the distinction was largely without meaning. Those who headed the vital
state ministries (and who were, of course, senior party members) were also on
the Politburo, thus linking the two pillars of the political system in one
decision-making body. It was a small body, usually with only about 16 full
members, somewhat smaller than the British cabinet but about the same size as
the US federal cabinet, making it relatively easy to agree upon and then enforce
policies. Its membership in a typical year during the 1980s consisted of perhaps
half a dozen people there purely through holding high central party office, four
or five who held vital regional party leaderships, as well as representatives of the
most important state organs, principally the ministers of defence and foreign
affairs, and the head of the KGB.
Political-Business Cycle
The political-business cycle is a political science concept thought to be
applicable in different ways in mostliberal democracies, although the
research in this area applies most obviously to the USA and the United
Kingdom. The basic idea is that government intervention in the economy is
inevitably influenced in part by electoral considerations. Depending on how
near a government is to facing a general election, its attitude to economic
decisions changes. At its simplest, it has long been thought in the UK that
governments are prepared to be fairly tough in economic decision making for
the first two or three years after an election but much less prepared to make
decisions that may lead to short-term unpopularity as the parliamentary term, a
maximum of five years, nears its end. Decisions on interest rates, for example,
or on government expenditure and tax changes, may be made even though
they could lead to inflationary pressure in the last year or so before an election,
when the same government might have been more financially conservative
shortly after winning an election. In popular language, this is often referred to
as a Chancellor of the Exchequer being pressured by his cabinet colleagues into
a ‘give-away’ budget six months or so before a likely election date.
There is some evidence for this, as there is for a political-business cycle in
the US, tied to the fixed two-yearly congressional elections and, to a much
greater extent, to the four-yearly presidential election cycle. The problems of
such a cycle are often alluded to in electoral rhetoric when one party will
Political-Business Cycle