Category: election

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Economy or austerity?

Economy or austerity? Drivers of retrospective voting before and during the Great Recession

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.

 

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Benchmarking or spillovers

Benchmarking or spillovers: the economic vote before and during the Great Recession

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.

Supplementary material

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Economic vote and globalization

Economic vote and globalization before and during the Great Recession

Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties – DOI: 10.1080/17457289.2019.1697881
 

The Great Recession undoubtedly reduced the electoral prospects of incumbent parties, coherently with the expectations of the economic vote theory. Yet, the exceptionality of the period may have displaced other elements of that theory, such as, for instance, the moderating impact that globalization is supposed to have on the retrospective mechanism. By using an original dataset comparing 168 elections in 38 democratic countries in the period 2000–2015, we detail how the crisis modified and even reversed that conditional effect. Furthermore, we differentiate our results by separating the impact of economic openness from that of political globalization. In so doing, we improve our understanding of the mechanisms that trigger the conditional effect on the economic vote in normal and exceptional times.

Dataset and do file

KEYWORDS: Economic vote, Great Recession, globalization
 
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