I would prefer not to
Check on NaspRead the synthesis of three of my recent articles dealing with the electoral answer to a crisis situation (written before the Covid19 emergency).
How will the electorate react to the present crisis? What about the myopic attribution of the responsabilities suggested by a realist approach to retrospective voting. And what about the hypotheses of benchmarking the situation and the capacity of managing the health emergency (tests, vaccines, lockdowns, differentiated policy measures…)?
International Political Science Review (2020) – DOI: 10.1177/0192512120919138
During the Great Recession, exceptionally harsh economic conditions were often countered by austerity policies that, according to many, further worsened and protracted the negative conjuncture.
Both elements, the poor state of the economy and the contractionary manoeuvers, are supposed to reduce the electoral prospects for incumbents. In this article, we compare the relative explanatory powers of these two theories before and during the economic crisis. We demonstrate that in normal times citizens are fiscally responsible, whereas during the Great Recession, and under certain conditions, austerity policies systematically reduced the support for incumbents on top of the state of the economy. This happened when the burdens of the manoeuvers were shared by many, in more equal societies, when the country was constrained by external conditionalities and when readjustments were mostly based on tax increases.
Quaderni di Scienza politica, (2019) 26(3): 383-408
During the Great Recession many incumbent parties were not confirmed in power by the ballots. The harsh law of the economic vote severely undermined their electoral chances. Yet it is unclear if they were punished by the absolute poor state of affairs, or by the relative deterioration of the economy; by a direct judgement of the domestic situation, or by its comparison with some external benchmark capturing more global dynamics; and whether or not the global crisis modified all these parameters. This exploratory analysis looks into all these issues using a dataset covering all the elections that took place in 38 democracies in the period 2000-2015, and contributing to the recent debate about the actual benchmarking of the state of the economy from behalf of voters. The Great Recession confirms its exceptional character, revealing that absolute reference points became more important than tailored benchmarks and short-term comparisons.
