Make Hay While the Sun Shines

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Daniel Kovarek, Research Fellow at the STG

If outgoing incumbents have time before the formal transfer of power, lame duck governments may implement organizational or fiscal measures that constrain the room for maneuver of their successors. In Hungary, the statutory period for the transfer of power following local elections is fifteen days. In 2024, new mayors were elected in June, but the mandates of office-holders lasted until October, creating a four-month lame duck period. We provide, to our knowledge, the first systematic analysis of the effects of transition length on the behavior of election losers. The study relies on quarter-yearly financial reports and municipal decrees from more than 3,000 Hungarian municipalities between 2019 and 2024. We combine event-study regressions estimated separately by cycle with a stacked triple-difference design that compares treated municipalities' transition-window behavior across the 2019 and 2024 elections. Municipalities where mayoral turnover involved a successor belonging to the opposite political bloc passed significantly more budget-amendment decrees during the prolonged window, raising the probability of a transition-window amendment by roughly ten percentage points, while other decree categories remained unchanged. Where the mayor changed, outgoing Fidesz-affiliated administrations dismissed a significantly higher number of municipal staff, as proxied by severance payments, during the four-month window; under the fifteen-day transition, dismissals were instead carried out by the incoming administrations after taking office. One-off bonus payments increased in both cycles, indicating that instantaneous instruments do not depend on the length of the transition window.

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