Assessment of Political Situation over the Business Cycle in Spain: A Time Series Analysis

The Great Recession has implied a strong increase of the unemployment rate in Spain that surpassed 25% in 2012, the highest rate in western economies in that year. At the same time, the assessment of political situation has greatly deteriorated. The goal of this paper is to study how the assessment of political situation has moved along the business cycle in Spain over the last twenty years by using a battery of statistical methods. Moreover, this study also investigates the existence of a long-run relationship applying the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration. Once the existence of a long-run relationship is evidenced, we construct a model that allows us to quantitatively evaluate the impact of the business cycle on the Spanish political situation. The empirical findings reveal that the unemployment rate has had a significant lagged impact on the assessment of political situation.