Their point of entry was to assume that agents inside the state behaved no differently from agents elsewhere: they maximized their incomes subject to their constraints. Rather than seeing politicians as neutrally steering the economy according to the vagaries of the business cycle with an eye to the public betterment, public choice theorists discerned a political business cycle, wherein state spending was matched to the electoral calendar to produce booms and slumps that were the cost of elected officials seeking to maximize votes.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 415