Intense debate surrounds the effects of trade on voting, yet less attention has been paid to how fluctuations in the real exchange rate may influence elections. A moderately overvalued currency enhances consumers’ purchasing power, yet extreme overvaluation threatens exports and economic growth. We therefore expect exchange rates to have a conditional effect on elections: when a currency is undervalued, voters will punish incumbents for further depreciations; yet when it is highly overvalued, they may reward incumbents for depreciation. We empirically explore our argument in three steps. First, we examine up to 412 elections in up to 59 democratic countries and show that voters generally punish depreciation in the real exchange rate when the currency is undervalued. We also find that at extremely high levels of currency overvaluation, voters sometimes reward incumbents for depreciation. A currency peg, especially in the eurozone, appears to insulate incumbents from these effects. In a second step, we explore the microfoundations of the election results through survey experiments in three advanced industrialized and two emerging market nations with different monetary and exchange rate policies and institutions. Respondents in countries with undervalued to mildly overvalued currencies disapprove of currency depreciations, whereas those facing a very highly overvalued currency favor depreciation. Third, we examine the mechanism of political competition in exchange rate policymaking and demonstrate that sustained undervaluation is rare in countries with strong political competition. Democratic governments have electoral incentives to avoid using undervalued currencies as a means of shielding workers from import competition.

Public choice theory suggests that citizens have a deficit bias: they approve governments for running large deficits that increase spending or reduce taxes. In contrast, others contend that citizens reward governments for balanced budgets. We contribute to this debate by modelling a popularity function for the Canadian federal government and show that the impact of fiscal policies on the executive's popularity changes over time. Until the early 1990s, Canadians preferred budget deficits. As deficits became unsustainable during the economic crisis of the early 1990s, the government shifted its fiscal policy paradigm, as balancing the budget became its primary fiscal objective and citizens were actively concerned about the deficits. Since 1993, citizens’ deficit bias morphed into an austerity bias: executive approval increases when deficits are reduced. These findings contribute to comparative political economy research by assessing how policy regimes and public preferences reinforce each other.

Recent scholarship on retrospective voting has shown that when they go to the polls, voters evaluate not only incumbent performance, but also the performance of parties in opposition. So far, however, these studies have not been able to identify how voters evaluate the performance of parties in opposition. The answers to a unique open-ended question included in a Belgian electoral survey in 2019 provide new insights into voters' minds. First, this study investigates what voters think about when they evaluate a party's performance in opposition. Second, it tests whether voters hold opposition parties responsible for the state of affairs in the country. The results show that voters are most concerned with opposition parties' competence in scrutinizing the government and providing constructive criticism, and dislike unconstructive and overly negative opposition. Furthermore, voters hold opposition parties accountable for the state of affairs in their country, albeit to a lesser extent than incumbent parties.

In this study, I investigate how information made available by the introduction of television affected the importance of the national economy in the context of US presidential elections from 1944 to 1964. Using the fact that television stations were introduced in counties across the United States at different points in time, I assess the effect of television on economic voting using a difference-in-differences design. I first show that television stations spent more time covering national politicians than did local newspapers in the 1960 presidential election. More national news increased the salience of the national economy in presidential elections. There was no evidence that television affected prospective pocketbook voting.

In Korean society, regionalism has deep historical roots and has had a great influence on elections. A historic event occurred in 2014 when a conservative party candidate, Lee Jung-hyun, was elected as a member of the National Assembly in Suncheon-si, Jeollanam-do, where liberal parties have been in the midst of powerful political influence. This was possible because voters responded to the candidate's appeal to vote based on benefits to the local economy, that is, securing greater funding from the central government. Exploiting the synthetic control method, this article identifies how this different choice has affected the budget of the local district. The results show that the community budget has increased dramatically, and a battery of robustness checks also supports these basic results. On the basis of the empirical evidence, the study suggests the possibility of overcoming a long-standing parochial regionalism in Korean politics through economic voting and its practical benefits.

We use nationwide deed-level records on home foreclosures to examine the effects of economic distress on electoral outcomes and individual voter turnout. County-level difference-in-differences estimates show that counties that suffered larger increases in foreclosures did not punish or reward members of the incumbent president's party more than less affected counties. Linking the Ohio voter file to individual foreclosures, difference-in-differences estimates show that individuals whose homes were foreclosed on were less likely to turn out, rather than being mobilized. However, in 2016 counties more exposed to foreclosures supported Trump at substantially higher rates. Taken together, the evidence suggests that the effect of local economic distress on incumbent performance is generally close to zero and only becomes substantial in unusual circumstances.

During the Great Recession, governments across the continent implemented austerity policies. A large literature claims that such policies are surprisingly popular and have few electoral costs. This article revisits this question by studying the popularity of governments during the economic crisis. The authors assemble a pooled time-series data set for monthly support for ruling parties from fifteen European countries and treat austerity packages as intervention variables to the underlying popularity series. Using time-series analysis, this permits the careful tracking of the impact of austerity packages over time. The main empirical contributions are twofold. First, the study shows that, on average, austerity packages hurt incumbent parties in opinion polls. Secondly, it demonstrates that the magnitude of this electoral punishment is contingent on the economic and political context: in instances of rising unemployment, the involvement of external creditors and high protest intensity, the cumulative impact of austerity on government popularity becomes considerable.

The association between how citizens perceive economic performance, insecurity, or corruption and how they evaluate the president varies systematically across Latin American countries and within them over time. In particular, while presidential popularity reflects these outcomes in the average Latin American country, survey data from 2006–17 confirm that the connection between government performance and presidential approval is generally stronger when unfragmented party systems or single-party majority governments make assessments of political responsibility easier. While these results suggest that the region’s citizens do not blindly blame the president for outcomes where political responsibility should be shared, they also remind us that there are many countries in the region where fragmented party systems weaken the conditions for effective political accountability.

The existing literature has demonstrated that both ethnic and economic factors affect a vote decision in African democracies. I show that there is a meaningful interaction between the two cleavages in their influence on voting. In particular, I argue for political salience of agricultural subsectors that shape the electoral consequences of economic performance in the context where agricultural policy affects the livelihood of the majority population. Relying on the analyses of the 2007 and 2013 elections in Kenya, I illustrate how likely an individual, who is attached to a politically coherent ethnic group, votes for a candidate, the majority of whose ethnic members engage in the same industry as the voter himself regardless of the candidate's ethnicity. The results show that the sector factor reinforces the positive and negative effects of ethnic communities on incumbent support, and also explains voting by ethnic minorities whose motives for voting are not ethnic.

While much ink has been spilled as to how economics impacts election outcomes, existing scholarship has concentrated on the valence model, which focuses on assessments of incumbent administration’s handling of the economy. Recently, however, there has been an appreciation that economic voting is multidimensional. Nonetheless, the impact of positional economics – voters’ views of economic policy – on the vote remains less explored, especially from a cross-national perspective. In this contribution, we examine the impact of economic policy preferences regarding income redistribution and spending preferences on the vote in 32 states. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 4 data and hierarchical models, we show that voters’ economic policy preferences directly impact vote choice in many states. We also show that positional economic voting is more likely to take hold in mature democracies. However, support for the idea that ideological polarization contributes to macro-diversity concerning positional economic voting is mixed at best. Our research breaks new ground regarding positional economic voting and highlights how context impacts the extent of positional economic voting.

Does the importance of the economy change during a government's time in office? Governments arguably become more responsible for current economic conditions as their tenure progresses. This might lead voters to hold experienced governments more accountable for economic conditions. However, voters also accumulate information about governments' competence over time. If voters are Bayesian learners, then this growing stock of information should crowd out the importance of current economic conditions. This article explores these divergent predictions about the relationship between tenure and the economic vote using three datasets. First, using country-level data from a diverse set of elections, the study finds that support for more experienced governments is less dependent on economic growth. Secondly, using individual-level data from sixty election surveys covering ten countries, the article shows that voters' perceptions of the economy have a greater impact on government support when the government is inexperienced. Finally, the article examines a municipal reform in Denmark that assigned some voters to new local incumbents and finds that these voters responded more strongly to the local economy. In conclusion, all three studies point in the same direction: economic voting decreases with time in office.

On compte actuellement un grand nombre de modèles politico-économiques ayant pour objectif de prédire l'issue des élections au Congrès américain ou le sort des candidats à la présidence des États-Unis. Bien qu'un certain nombre de modèles aient vu le jour pour la France, l'Allemagne et le Royaume-Uni au cours des dernières années, le Canada, à l'instar de la majorité des démocraties, n'a reçu jusqu’à maintenant que bien peu d'attention. Cet article vise par conséquent à développer un modèle ancré dans une théorie du vote capable de prédire suffisamment à l'avance la part des voix récoltées par le parti sortant lors des scrutins fédéraux canadiens. Le Canada étant un système multipartite, différents modèles de régressions apparemment indépendantes sont également proposés afin de déterminer s'il est possible de prédire simultanément les scores de plusieurs formations politiques.

Considerable research shows the presence of an economic vote, with governments rewarded or punished by voters, depending on the state of the economy. But how stable is this economic vote? A current argument holds its effect has increased over time, because of weakening long-term social and political forces. Under these conditions, short-term forces, foremostly the economic issue, can come to the fore. A counter-argument, however, sees the economic vote effect in decline, due to globalization. Against these rival hypotheses rests the status-quo argument: the economic vote effect remains unchanged. To test these claims, we estimate carefully specified models of the incumbent vote, at both the individual and aggregate levels. Western European elections provide the data, with particular attention to Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Perhaps surprisingly, we find the economic vote to be stable over time, a ‘standing decision’ rule that voters follow in national elections.

Latin American pension reforms during the 1990s dramatically increased the number of people in the region who had a direct stake in the returns on financial capital. This article asks: How, if at all, has this expansion affected Latin American politics? It focuses particularly on popular attitudes towards neoliberalism. It argues that government-induced expansions of capital ownership do not directly affect public preferences about neoliberalism, but did so indirectly by shaping the information that people use to judge whether neoliberalism is welfare enhancing. According to this view, participation in a reformed Latin American pension system should lead to acceptance of neoliberalism when pensions returns are high, but have the opposite effect when returns are low. This study analyzes multiple datasets of Latin American survey data and finds support for this theory.

This article investigates the effect of local economic conditions on voting behavior by focusing on the export-oriented agricultural areas of Argentina during the commodities boom. It assesses the marginal effect of export wealth on electoral outcomes by studying the impact of soybean production, the main Argentine export product during this period. The combination of rising agricultural prices and a salient national tax on exports allows us to evaluate how wealth and tax policy shape local electoral behavior. This study relies on a spatial econometric analysis of the vote across Argentine departments for the 2007–15 period, along with qualitative evidence from interviews and a descriptive analysis of government appointments.

Recent research on economic voting has moved beyond the traditional reward–punishment hypothesis, according to which the economy is merely considered a valence issue. Instead, patrimonial economic voting research looks at voters as property owners within the economic system. These studies have relied on survey items that measure whether individuals own different kinds of property to test the patrimonial dimension. This study emphasizes the importance of a surprisingly neglected aspect: the value of assets. It uses official register data files from the Swedish Tax Agency on the value of individuals’ assets merged with survey data from the 2006 Swedish National Election Study. The study finds that the relationship between patrimony and voting behavior in Sweden is similar to that found in other countries, but only when it is tested in a similar way as in these studies – that is, only when it is coded as whether voters own different assets. This study brings three important contributions to the debate. First, it offers a new empirically based categorization of the dimensionality of asset ownership and shows that the previous distinction between low- and high-risk assets is insufficient. Secondly, it shows that merely having assets or not, which is what previous studies have measured, is not what primarily matters; the relevant factor is the value of the assets. And thirdly, it demonstrates that only the value of some kinds of assets matters (especially stocks and real estate properties), while other assets (savings in bonds and funds) do not affect voting behavior or political opinions.