Retrospective Economic Voting Research Articles

Urban home values and multi-level political accountability: Evidence from Calgary, Canada

ABSTRACT While retrospective economic voting—that is, punishing or rewarding incumbent politicians for the performance of the economy—is well studied, much less is known about the electoral implications of the housing market across levels of government. Which, if any, levels of government are judged on the basis of real estate prices? This piece considers this question, using panel survey data and home assessment data from Calgary, Alberta, a city where housing prices have stagnated in recent years relative to other Canadian cities. We find that support for incumbents at both the local and provincial levels are related to impressions of the direction of the housing market. City councilors, however, are the only politicians who seem to be held accountable for the performance of the housing market. Our results suggest that, at the local level, housing prices are an important consideration for economic voting.

Pandemic politics: COVID-19, health concerns, and vote choice in the 2020 General Election

ABSTRACT How might personal concerns for one’s health, and public health more generally, affect candidate vote choice during the COVID-19 crisis? In this, study we leverage a national survey conducted in the United States during the earliest phase of the pandemic, and an original survey fielded in Florida as positive COVID-19 rates were rising, to assess how personal exposure to the coronavirus conditions candidate vote choice. Despite heightened partisan polarization, we find that one’s health concerns depressed support for the sitting president, even among Republicans. Individuals who were very concerned about contracting COVID-19, who wore a mask to protect themselves from the coronavirus, and who were more concerned about the virus’s impact on public health than the economy were less likely to support the reelection of Donald J. Trump. As with retrospective and prospective economic voting, the threat of the health pandemic has the potential to alter the calculus of candidate vote choice.

ВЫБОРЫ ВО ВРЕМЯ ЧУМЫ: АНАЛИЗ ЭЛЕКТОРАЛЬНОЙ ПОДДЕРЖКИ ПРАВЯЩИХ ПАРТИЙ В ПЕРИОД ПАНДЕМИИ

In the article we used the method of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to investigate the results of 43 electoral campaigns in different countries of the World, held in the context of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. As far as socioeconomic indicators worsened almost everywhere, we aimed to identify the mechanism of the retrospective economic voting as creating potentially critical risks for the ruling parties. Since, in practice, countries have roughly halved in terms of the increase or decrease in electoral support for incumbents, the authors examined the effect of factors associated with the degree of deterioration of the socio-economic situation, state restrictive measures and the development of the pandemic itself, also taking into account the features of the political regime. Nine scenarios were identified, representing various combinations of conditions, leading in six cases to an increase in support for the incumbent, and in three cases to its decrease. The study showed that the classic retrospective voting in terms of punishing incumbent for a downturn in the economy is more often manifested in democratic regimes. It is also noteworthy that socio-economic factors, which are the consequences of a pandemic, appear to be more significant to the electorate than factors directly related to the health issues. In particular, a relatively low level of GDP decline is always present in scenarios of support growth for an incumbent, and a significant increase in unemployment is always present in all scenarios of a decrease in its rating. A feature of authoritarian regimes is that voters are more inclined to support the ruling parties with mild restrictive measures, while in democracies people are ready to vote for incumbents even in the case of tough, but in some way effective restrictions. In general, restrictive measures (like their absence) always affect elections, but their effect depends on other conditions. In consideration of the natural limitations in the form of a sample of countries, the peculiarities of the method used and the further development of the pandemic, it seems important to continue such studies in order to clarify the conclusions and perspectives.

Government Partisanship and Electoral Accountability: The Effect of Perceived Employment Situation on Partisan Vote Switching

What are the electoral impacts of perceptions of unemployment under different partisan persuasions of the government? Neither the literature on retrospective economic voting nor partisan voting has provided a compelling answer to this question. This paper addresses this puzzle by analyzing panel surveys and leveraging differences in government partisanship in two consecutive elections. I argue that negative evaluations of the employment situation induce voter transition to support a left-wing party under a right-wing government, but that such voter perceptions do not affect vote choice under a left-wing government. An analysis of a voter transition, using British Election Panel Study 1992–1997 and 1997–2001, reveals findings that support my argument. My argument suggests conditional partisan voting effects. Essentially, the effect of economic issues on vote choice is conditional on issue salience and which party “owns” the issue, namely, the varying levels of issue salience related to government partisanship.

The Contexts of Electoral Accountability: Electoral Integrity Performance Voting in 23 Democracies

AbstractElectoral accountability is typically identified with retrospective economic voting even though it is widely recognized that explaining electors’ assignment of responsibility also implies considering issues other than the economy. Recently, scholars have also stressed the role of election quality in contributing to democratic legitimacy of elected authorities. In this perspective, electoral integrity as a valence issue would influence voters’ behaviour, structuring attitudes about accountability in substantial ways. This effect would also be moderated by individual- and country-level factors. I test these assumptions in 23 countries worldwide using a multilevel analysis of data from the sixth wave of the World Values Survey. Results indicate that the strength of the link between perceptions of electoral integrity and vote for the incumbent seems to be affected by individual characteristics such as partisanship, while it is also moderated by specific contextual characteristics such as government clarity of responsibility and pluralism of the media.

The three stages of the anti‐incumbency vote: Retrospective economic voting in young and established democracies

AbstractEconomic prosperity is the best recipe for an incumbent government to be re‐elected. However, the financial crisis was significantly more consequential for governing parties in young rather than in established democracies. This article introduces the age of democracy as a contextual explanation which moderates the degree to which citizens vote retrospectively. It shows a curvilinear effect of the age of democracy on retrospective economic voting. In a first stage after the transition to democracy, reform governments suffer from a general anti‐incumbency effect, unrelated to economic performance. In a second step, citizens in young democracies relate the legitimacy of democratic actors to their economic performance rather than to procedural rules, and connect economic outcomes closely to incumbent support. As democracies mature, actors profit from a reservoir of legitimacy, and retrospective voting declines. Empirically, these hypotheses are corroborated by data on vote change and economic performance in 59 democracies worldwide, over 25 years.

Erratum to: Credit or debit? The effect of issue ownership on retrospective economic voting

Erratum to: Credit or debit? The effect of issue ownership on retrospective economic voting

Credit or debit? The effect of issue ownership on retrospective economic voting

This paper examines issue ownership as a mechanism for understanding how voters’ expectations of parties’ issue competence impact retrospective voting. On the one hand, issue ownership can represent a stock of credit for parties to draw on, which may help incumbent parties escape punishment for poor performance. On the other hand, prior issue competence associations may set certain expectations in voters’ minds. This lends to the idea that parties might be even more severely punished for poor performance when they own the issue. This contribution sets out to test these two propositions. Our results suggest that since voters expect the party to perform well, especially on the issue it owns, positive performance reaps no reward, while negative performance is more severely punished. There are, however, differences across parties, with the chancellor party in government held as the main actor responsible for positive or negative economic developments.

State of the Field

AbstractAlthough scholars of West European politics have long debated whether the region's highly institutionalised party systems were becoming de‐aligned and electorally unstable, the political fallout from the post‐2008 financial crisis has lent a new sense of urgency to the debate. The threats posed to party systems by economic crises are hardly unique to Europe, however. The Latin American experience with the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s suggests that party system upheaval was not simply a function of retrospective economic voting during the period of crisis. It was also attributable to programmatically de‐aligning policy responses to crises – namely the ‘bait‐and‐switch’ imposition of austerity and adjustment measures by labour‐based, left‐leaning parties that were traditional champions of statist and redistributive policies. Such patterns of reform made it difficult for party systems to channel societal resistance to market orthodoxy in the post‐adjustment era, setting the stage for convulsive ‘reactive sequences’ when such resistance arose outside and against mainstream parties through varied forms of social and electoral protest, typically on the left flank. This article explores the political fallout from the European and Latin American economic crises from a comparative perspective, arguing that it is essential to think beyond the short‐term political dynamics of crisis management to consider the longer‐term institutional legacies and fragilities of the different political alignments forged around crisis‐induced policy reforms.

How party nationalization conditions economic voting

In this article we analyze the conditioning effect of party nationalization, and in particular dynamic nationalization, on economic voting. While previous single-country and cross-national studies suggest a weak correlation between economic conditions and voting patterns, we argue that this relationship is conditioned by the degree to which parties are dynamically nationalized. Using both case study and large-n analysis, we show first that retrospective voting can be more nationalized than prospective voting. We then argue that national economic conditions cannot and do not relate to voting patterns, at least when weak dynamic nationalization is weak. The findings also call into question the well-known thesis about the clarity of responsibility as a conditional factor in explaining retrospective (economic) voting. There is imperfect correspondence between “clarity of responsibility” and dynamic party nationalization, but retrospective voting presumes that voters across the country respond in kind. This explains why the only evidence we find of a correlation of national economic indicators and voting is when there is high dynamic nationalization.

Voting Behavior in Indonesia from 1999 to 2014: Religious Cleavage or Economic Performance?

In this study, we examine the voting behavior in Indonesian parliamentary elections from 1999 to 2014. After summarizing the changes in Indonesian parties’ share of the vote from a historical standpoint, we investigate the voting behavior with simple regression models to analyze the effect of regional characteristics on Islamic/secular parties’ vote share, using aggregated panel data at the district level. Then, we also test the hypothesis of retrospective economic voting. The results show that districts which formerly stood strongly behind Islamic parties continued to select those parties, or gave preference to abstention over the parties in some elections. From the point of view of retrospective economic voting, we found that districts which experienced higher per capita economic growth gave more support to the ruling parties, although our results remain tentative because information on 2014 is not yet available.

Retrospective Economic Voting and the Intertemporal Dynamics of Electoral Accountability in the American States

How durable are politicians’ policymaking reputations with the electorate? A theory of reputation depreciation is advanced to explain why the electorate’s capacity to hold former officeholders accountable for prior economic stewardship is weakening not only in the time elapsed between prior elective office and seeking subsequent elective office, but also diminishing at a greater rate as the evaluative window for making retrospective economic assessments widens. Aggregate electoral data on ex-governors in the American states suggests that while prior economic stewardship evaluated over entire tenure in office for ex-governors offer the strongest initial retrospective economic attributions, it also yields the greatest rate of reputation depreciation for ex-governors seeking future elective office. Reputational slippage transpires with the passage of time between prior elective office and returning to the electoral arena, whereby voters experience increasing difficulty when it comes to rewarding competent experienced politicians, as well as sanctioning their incompetent counterparts.

Nuanced Voters in Japan: Estimating Transition between Economic and Accountability Voting

Recent retrospective voting studies have focused not only on the retrospective economic voting (economic voting), but also on the retrospective accountability voting (accountability voting). Retrospective voting based on voter’s evaluations of economic conditions is considered economic voting, whereas accountability voting is where voters consider the consistency between promises the government makes and what it actually implements. Voters are assumed to waver between economic and accountability voting; this balance informs time-series transitions in relative weight given to each in voting behavior. Referring to such voters as nuanced voters, this research uses the case of Japan’s electoral politics and attempts to determine historical change in retrospective voting patterns. In this study, electoral accountability is set as the deviation of the realized (observed) value from the promised value by the government. Two types of analysis are then conducted: the impulse-response functions between economic/accountability voting and the cabinet approval rate by a Bayesian structural vector autoregressive (B-SVAR) model, and time-series contributions of economic/accountability components for approval ratings by historical decompositions (HDC). Assuming that the weight of economic/accountability voting changed after 1993-94 electoral institutional reform in Japan, a transition in the behavior of nuanced voters was clearly apparent in public works spendings in the private goods sphere. Moreover, according to theoretical expectations, accountability voting in regard to government expenditures and GDP predominated both pre- and post-reform, and neither nuanced change between economic and accountability voting nor critical change after reform were observed.

Economic voting in Finland before and after an economic crisis

This study examines the importance of retrospective economic voting in Finland. More specifically, it investigates if the magnitude of the economic vote was greater after the global financial crisis that unfolded in 2008–2009, as well as if perceptions of the economy had an independent influence on vote choice even when controlling for long-term social cleavages and political predispositions. Using post-election survey data from the 2007 and 2011 parliamentary elections, the first empirical models suggest that the incentives to punish government parties were stronger in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The impact of economic evaluations on vote choice, however, did not remain significant when controlling for long-term anchoring forces related to social background and political predispositions.

Retrospective Economic Voting and the Intertemporal Dynamics of Electoral Accountability in the American States

Are politicians' policymaking reputations durable according to the judgment of voters? A theory of intertemporal attribution discounting is advanced for purposes of explaining how voters apply heterogeneous sanctions and rewards for a non-incumbent candidate’s prior economic stewardship in elective office. Aggregate electoral data on ex-governors in the American states uncovers strong empirical evidence of intertemporal attribution discounting behavior. Voters using prior economic stewardship over entire tenure in office for ex-governors form the strongest initial retrospective economic attributions, but also intertemporally discount ex-governors seeking future elective office at a higher rate than compared to when their retrospective evaluations are restricted to either the last term or final year in office. This study demonstrates that reputational slippage transpires with the passage of time between prior elective office and returning to the electoral arena, whereby voters experience increasing difficulty when it comes to rewarding competent experienced politicians, as well as sanctioning incompetent counterparts.

Election forecasting under opaque conditions: A model for Francophone Belgium, 1981–2010

Abstract Election forecasting models assume retrospective economic voting and clear mechanisms of accountability. Indeed, previous research indicates that incumbent political parties are held accountable for the state of the economy. In this article we investigate a ‘hard case’ for the assumptions of election forecasting models. Belgium is a multiparty system with perennial coalition governments. Furthermore, it has two completely segregated party systems (Dutch and French language). Since the prime minister during the period 1974–2011 has always been a Dutch language politician, French language voters could not even vote for the prime minister, so this cognitive shortcut to establishing political accountability is not available. The results of an analysis for the French speaking parties (1981–2010) show that retrospective economic voting occurs even in these conditions of opaque accountability, as election results respond to indicators with regard to GDP and unemployment levels. Party membership figures can be used to model the popularity function in election forecasting.

When Pay Outs Pay Off: Conditional Cash-Transfers and Voting Behavior in Brazil 2002---2010

This paper estimates the electoral effects of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) --- the fastest-growing social policy in the developing world --- in three presidential elections in Brazil. It analyzes municipal level electoral results and survey data, and employs matching techniques to reduce causal inference problems typical of observational studies. Results shows that CCTs are associated with increased performance by the incumbent party presidential candidate in all three elections, but that these effects have diminished over time, and have been reaped by incumbents from different parties. It also shows that CCTs have had no discernible impacts on party identification and the performance of incumbent parties in legislative elections. Together, these findings suggest that CCTs effects are short lived, similar to that of good economic performance in retrospective economic voting models, and as such, lack the capacity to induce substantial voter realignments.

Economic perceptions and electoral choice in South Korea: the case of the 2007 presidential election

While the notion that subjective economic perceptions as well as objective economic conditions affect electoral outcomes has long been explored in advanced democracies and new democracies, evidence of the link between the economy and elections has been rarely found in East Asian countries. As economic issues have become salient since the 1997 financial crisis, political leaders’ capacity to manage the economy has become one of the most important criteria in electoral choice in East Asia. This paper examines how economic issues influenced the results of the 2007 presidential election in South Korea. By making use of the 2007 Presidential Election Panel Study, this study examines the continuity of and changes in the Korean voters’ electoral behavior. This study describes the political situation in the post-1997 financial crisis period under two liberal governments in Korea and introduces the processes and characteristics of electoral campaigns in the 2007 presidential election. This paper then explores the link between the economy and vote choice, focusing on whether economic issues were salient among the electorate, whether retrospective or prospective economic voting was prevalent among Koreans, and how the voters supported Lee Myung Bak across age groups, regions, and parties in the 2007 presidential election.

Notes on the Brazilian 2006 Presidential Elections: The Winding Road to Democratic Consolidation

The paper describes the main characteristics of the 2006 Brazilian Presidential elections. It explores two defining traits of this elections: the interplay between how retrospective economic voting and views towards corruption affected vote volatility and the final result of the election. The paper concludes by pointing out implications of the current elections to the strengthening of democracy in Brazil.

Another Look at Connections Across German Elections

By examining connections between recent federal and state elections in Germany, we evaluate whether German elections seem to be maintaining some interesting preunification patterns broadly reminiscent of American elections, even as the re-absorption of the East has made the German party system more chaotic. Regional partisan stability does persist and there is continuity by way of a robust ‘moderating elections’ phenomenon: all parties suffer in state polls when holding power nationally, the big parties quite substantially. The evidence for retrospective economic voting of late, though mixed, is actually stronger than was the comparable evidence for the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The larger goal is to begin to explore how one might develop a cross-national analysis of whether there are general patterns consistent with actors in parliamentary democracies exploiting multiple occasions to vote - as created by bicameralism, federalism, mixed proportional-plural electoral rules, and local government - systematically in an effort to rein in governments or finetune policy.