The Economics of Politics in Comparative Perspective Revisited: An Introduction

Abstract

Students of political behavior have long been interested in whether and how economics structures politics. Over the past two and a half decades, much effort has been devoted to investigating the influence of the economy on voting behavior, election outcomes, and government support in democratic polities. A special issue of Political Behavior explicitly addressed these issues some thirteen years ago. Since the publication of that special issue, however, a number of important developments have occurred. Clearly, we have learned a great deal about the influence of the economy on elections. We have been able to establish that there are powerful effects of economic conditions and perceptions at various levels of analysis (see Nannestad and Paldam, 1994, for an overview). Increasingly, attention has centered on identifying how the economy influences vote choice; that is, research has focused on which of voters' many economic perceptions are most important (see especially Lewis-Beck, 1988). The cumulative body of empirical work now supports a sociotropic electorate that votes on the basis of the state of the national economy. The bulk of this work finds that voters evaluate past performance, although some recent research also suggests that voters are "prospective," basing their political judgments on expectations of future economic performance (Lewis-Beck, 1988). Regardless of the exact nature of the effects, it is now fairly clear that vote choice and election outcomes are driven by the direction and magnitude of economic change, whether retrospective or prospective in nature. Scholarly interest in the relationship between the economy and politics