The aim of this paper is to analyze the effects of presidential elections on the government’s social expenditure in Mexico over the 1995-2016 period. To do so, extended autoregressive models are estimated for the total social expenditures and two of its main components, to take into account economics factors. Among the most outstanding results is that the growth of GDP and total government revenues play a significant role as control variables. More importantly, there is (full) evidence of a political budget cycle on the total social public expenditure and (partial evidence) on the regional development function; on the contrary, there is no evidence on the function of provision and social assistance. These results, on the one hand, support the hypothesis of opportunistic behavior of the governments to stay in power by using public resources for political clientelism and, on the other, reflect the difficulties to capture these practices.

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