¹ See, for example, Rose, Richard and Mackie, Thomas T., ‘Incumbency in Government: Asset or Liability?’, in Daalder, Hans and Mair, Peter, eds, Western European Party Systems: Continuity and Change (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1983), pp. 115–137.Google Scholar

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⁴ Kramer, Gerald H., ‘Short-term Fluctuations in U.S. Voting Behavior, 1896–1964’, American Political Science Review, 65 (1971), 131–143CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a related line of research that originates from Mueller and Goodhart and Bhansali, scholars have examined the impact of economic variables on the executive’s popularity rate (see Mueller, ‘Presidential Popularity’; and Goodhart, C. A. E. and Bhansali, R. J., ‘Political Economy’, Political Studies, 18 (1970), 43–106)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁶ For example, Remmer, Karen L., ‘The Political Impact of Economic Crisis in Latin America in the 1980s’, American Political Science Review, 85 (1991), 777–800CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Remmer, Karen L., ‘The Political Economy of Elections in Latin America, 1981–1991’, American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 393–407CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pacek, Alexander C., ‘Macroeconomic Conditions and Electoral Politics in East Central Europe’, American Journal of Political Science, 38 (1994), 723–744CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fidrmuc, Jan, ‘Economics of Voting in Post-Communist Countries’, Electoral Studies, 19 (2000), 197–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pacek, Alexander C. and Radcliff, Benjamin, ‘The Political Economy of Competitive Elections in the Developing World’, American Journal of Political Science, 39 (1995), 745–759CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilkin, Sam, Haller, Brandon and Norpoth, Helmut, ‘From Argentina to Zambia: A World-Wide Test of Economic Voting’, Electoral Studies, 16 (1997), 301–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁹ Powell, and Whitten, , ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting’.Google Scholar

¹⁰ For example, Whitten, Guy D. and Palmer, Harvey D., ‘Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting’, Electoral Studies, 18 (1999), 49–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chappell, Henry W. Jr and Gonçalves Veiga, Linda, ‘Economics and Elections in Western Europe: 1960–1997’, Electoral Studies, 19 (2000), 183–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Royed, Terry J., Leyden, Kevin M. and Borrelli, Stephen A., ‘Is “Clarity of Responsibility” Important for Economic Voting? Revisiting Powell and Whitten’s Hypothesis’, British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 669–698CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bengtsson, Åsa, ‘Economic Voting: The Effect of Political Context, Volatility and Turnout on Voters’ Assignment of Responsibility’, European Journal of Political Research, 43 (2004), 749–767CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ For example, Anderson, Christopher J., Blaming the Government: Citizens and the Economy in Five European Democracies (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1995) )Google Scholar; Anderson, Christopher J., ‘Economic Voting and Political Context: A Comparative Perspective’, Electoral Studies, 19 (2000), 151–170CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nadeau, Richard, Niemi, Richard G. and Yoshinaka, Antoine, ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context Across Time and Nations’, Electoral Studies, 21 (2002), 403–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, Cameron D., ‘Economic Voting and Multilevel Governance: A Comparative Individual-Level Analysis’, American Journal of Political Science, 50 (2006), 449–463CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Duch, Raymond M. and Stevenson, Randolph T., The Economic Vote: How Political and Economic Institutions Condition Election Results (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Duch, and Stevenson, , The Economic Vote, p. 26.Google Scholar

¹³ Powell, and Whitten, , ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting’.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Duch, and Stevenson, , The Economic Vote, pp. 293–308.Google Scholar

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¹⁸ Laakso, Markku and Taagepera, Rein, ‘Effective Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to Western Europe’, Comparative Political Studies, 12 (1979), 3–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Since the sources of election results usually lump small parties into an ‘other’ category, we cannot precisely know which parties received how many seats. I used the method recommended by Taagepera to approximate the effective number of parties from incomplete data (see Taagepera, Rein, ‘Effective Number of Parties for Incomplete Data’, Electoral Studies, 16 (1997), 145–151CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

¹⁹ The list of pre-electoral coalitions was obtained from Golder, Sona Nadenichek, The Logic of Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006).Google Scholar

²⁰ The data on this variable will be publicly available on the author’s website.

²¹ Anderson, , ‘Economic Voting and Political Context’Google Scholar; Bengtsson, , ‘Economic Voting’Google Scholar.

²² The correlation coefficient of the two variables is 0.630 in my data from seventeen democracies. Whether this number is high or low is a matter of personal judgement, yet my point is not on the empirical pattern but on the theoretical problem of using a variable of party system fragmentation when the interest is on opposition fragmentation.

²³ Switzerland and the United States have sometimes been included in the literature, yet I chose to exclude them to focus only on parliamentary systems. Although France is not a pure parliamentary system, Lewis-Beck’s findings suggest that it can be treated as if it was a parliamentary system in the context of economic voting. Lewis-Beck, Michael S., ‘Who’s the Chef? Economic Voting under a Dual Executive’, European Journal of Political Research, 31 (1997), 315–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The cases where a non-party cabinet existed before the election (Italy 1994 and 1996, Greece 1989 (November) and 1990, and Finland 1975) were excluded from the analysis. Also, elections that were held within one year after the previous elections were excluded (six cases) because those elections typically take place when the previous election did not produce a clear winner (for example, the February 1974 election in Britain) and the country needed another election to choose a governing party. Governments during such periods would not be held responsible for policy performances. Note that I repeated the analysis by including those observations and obtained comparable results (the detailed results are available upon request).

²⁴ Powell, and Whitten, , ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting’Google Scholar. I repeated my analysis by adding inflation rate and gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, but the results remained unchanged (the detailed results are available upon request). The data for the unemployment rate were obtained from OECD’s website (www.SourceOECD.org) and missing values were filled from the Bulletin of Labour Statistics by the International Labour Office. The unemployment rate used is the average value of four quarters including the quarter the election took place, as used by Powell and Whitten.

²⁵ Some may question whether the inclusion of this variable ‘overcontrols’ the model because the dependent variable is the change from the previous election to the current election. Yet, this is a standard configuration of a regression model in this line of research (see Powell, and Whitten, , ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting’, p. 394).Google Scholar

²⁶ Lijphart, Arend, Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁷ Powell, and Whitten, , ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting’.Google Scholar

²⁸ The actual estimation was performed with the ‘xtpcse’ command with the ‘hetonly’ option in Stata version 9.2. The command ‘xtpcse’ estimates panel-corrected standard errors developed in Beck, Nathaniel and Katz, Jonathan N., ‘What to Do (and Not to Do) with Time-Series Cross-Section Data’, American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 634–647CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Using the ‘hetonly’ option, the model does not correct for contemporaneous correlation. This does not apply to my data, because the timing of elections is different in each country. More specifically, the panel-corrected standard errors method requires at least one time period common to all panels in order to estimate disturbance covariance for the correction of contemporaneous correlation. To check for a potential problem of contemporaneous correlation, I repeated the analysis while including dummy variables of decades. The results remained unchanged.

²⁹ Bollen, K. A. and Jackman, R. W., ‘Regression Diagnostics: An Expository Treatment of Outliers and Influential Cases’, in J. Fox and J. S. Long, eds, Modern Methods of Data Analysis (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990), pp. 257–291.Google Scholar

³⁰ The detailed results of the robustness checks are available upon request.

³¹ For example, the coefficient on UNEMP reported in the table is the marginal effect of UNEMP on the dependent variable only when ENOP is 0, which is outside the range of the ENOP variable. Likewise, since UNEMP is not 0 except for extraordinary circumstances, the reported coefficient and standard error of ENOP do not have any substantive meanings by themselves.

³² Friedrich, Robert J., ‘In Defense of Multiplicative Terms In Multiple Regression Equations’, American Journal of Political Science, 26 (1982), 797–833CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brambor, Thomas, Roberts Clark, William and Golder, Matt, ‘Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses’, Political Analysis, 14 (2006), 63–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ In the original ‘clarity’ variable, smaller values indicated higher clarity. In my analysis, I flipped the values for easier interpretation.

³⁴ Since one standard deviation lower than the mean in the ENOP variable is below its lower limit, ENOP is kept at 1 (its lowest value) in Graph C.