Compare methods

	Partisan Business Cycle Analysis	Central Bank Independence Index
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Regression model	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1977	1992
Originator	Douglas Hibbs (partisan theory); Alberto Alesina (rational partisan theory)	Alex Cukierman, Steven B. Webb & Bilin Neyapti
Type	Time-series econometric model of partisan macroeconomic outcomes	Composite institutional index
Seminal source	Hibbs, D. A. (1977). Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy. American Political Science Review, 71(4), 1467-1487.	Cukierman, A., Webb, S. B., & Neyapti, B. (1992). Measuring the Independence of Central Banks and Its Effect on Policy Outcomes. World Bank Economic Review, 6(3), 353-398.
Aliases	Partisan Theory Analysis, Rational Partisan Theory, Hibbs Partisan Model, Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy	CWN Index, Cukierman CBI Index, Legal Central Bank Independence Index, CBI Index
Related	3	2
Summary	Partisan business cycle analysis tests whether left-wing and right-wing governments produce systematically different macroeconomic outcomes. Douglas Hibbs's 1977 partisan theory argued that because left and right parties represent constituencies with different exposures to unemployment and inflation, left governments durably push for lower unemployment while tolerating higher inflation, and right governments do the reverse. Alberto Alesina's 1987 rational partisan theory added rational expectations and nominal wage contracts: when parties differ and election outcomes are uncertain, the surprise of who wins generates only a transitory burst of partisan divergence in output and employment, which fades once contracts adjust. The empirical method regresses macroeconomic series on a partisan government indicator and post-election dummies to distinguish permanent from transitory effects.	The central bank independence index of Cukierman, Webb, and Neyapti (1992) is the foundational quantitative measure of how insulated a monetary authority is from political control. It reads the central bank's statute and codes dozens of legal provisions into four groups — the appointment, tenure, and dismissal of the chief executive; who holds authority over monetary policy formulation and conflict resolution; the bank's statutory objectives, especially the primacy of price stability; and the limits on the bank's lending to government — then scores each provision on a zero-to-one scale and aggregates them with explicit weights into a legal independence index running from zero to one. To capture the gap between law and practice, the authors complement this de jure index with a de facto measure: the turnover rate of central bank governors. The framework launched the empirical literature linking institutional design to inflation performance.