In the Introduction to this volume, we reported that instabilities in the results of past studies have led researchers to call for a methodological fix – a “trick” that would give stability to their findings. We believe that one way to find this trick is to employ an approach that solves the various problems outlined in Chapter 1. Whether such an approach would be the required trick – the ideal approach that would yield stable findings – remains to be seen. By addressing the problems we have enumerated, however, we will take a major step in the right direction. On the basis of our discussion of these problems, and summarizing the conclusions we reached in Chapter 1, we can reiterate some of the properties that an ideal approach would have.

The first property of an ideal approach is that it should allow us to combine information from different countries in a single dataset that contains data at the level of individual respondents. Such a dataset would permit us to use objective national economic indicators to measure economic conditions. In order to obtain sufficient variance in economic conditions for reliable effects to be measured, the number of different elections needs to be quite large. How many elections we need to study in order to acquire adequate variation in economic conditions is not something that can be definitively stated.