When inflation spikes, it takes exactly seven months for the public to turn on the government.
We assume political anger is an instant, emotional reaction to economic pain. This study of the US and Brazil found a remarkably consistent 'latency constant' of seven months before inflation shocks hit approval ratings. It’s as if humans have a universal psychological rhythm for how long they can tolerate rising prices before they demand a new leader. This 7-month lag means politicians are often punished for months-old mistakes, or rewarded for fixes that haven't actually helped yet. It suggests our political 'mood' follows a predictable, biological-like clock that politicians can't easily speed up or slow down.
The Latency of Discontent: Measuring the Feedback Delay of Economic Shocks on Democratic Support in Brazil and the United States
SSRN · 6461658
This article provides a rigorous empirical test of the control-theoretic framework developed in the companion paper (Article 1). Using harmonized monthly time series for Brazil (2003-2024) and the United States (2004-2024), we estimate VAR(2) models with Cholesky identification to recover the peak response lag (τ*)-the primary empirical estimator of democratic feedback latency. An exploratory case (Chile) is presented separately in Appendix C. The principal findings are threefold. First, a 7-mon