7 - THE OLD REGIME HYPOTHESIS

Summary

Unlike both the Incumbency and the New Regime hypotheses, which predict the types of parties likely to benefit from better economic conditions, the Old Regime hypothesis predicts the type of parties – Old Regime parties – that are likely to receive more electoral support in parts of the country where economic conditions are worse. As will be demonstrated in this chapter, the Old Regime hypothesis has the most consistent empirical support of the three standard economic voting hypotheses examined in this book. Of the twenty-nine parties coded as Old Regime parties across the entire study, there is strong empirical support for the prediction that Old Regime parties should perform better where economic conditions are worse in twenty-one (or 72%) of these cases; by contrast, there is only one case of an Old Regime party that generates strong empirical evidence that the economy had the opposite effect from what was predicted by the Old Regime hypothesis. Moreover, there is support for the Old Regime hypothesis in a wide variety of contexts, including presidential and parliamentary elections, high and low responsibility elections, and elections that take place throughout the decade. Indeed, about the only context in which there is not consistently strong support for the Old Regime hypothesis is in Russian elections, a point that is addressed throughout this chapter.

The chapter is organized in largely the same manner as the first two empirical chapters, examining coding decisions, the paired case studies, overall results, and then analyses of the support provided for the different conditional economic voting hypotheses by Old Regime parties.