Recent literature argues that with ever‐increasing levels of supranational constraints governments have less ‘room to manoeuvre’; therefore, voters will place less weight on policy outcomes in their voting decisions. The question that remains less explored is how voters fill this accountability gap. We argue that, in this context, voters may move away from outcome‐ to input‐oriented voting. Fulfilling their promises becomes less vital for incumbents as long as they exhibit effort to overturn an unpopular policy framework. We test this argument against a survey experiment conducted in the run‐up to the September 2015 election in Greece, where we find a positive impact of the incumbent's exerted effort to challenge the status quo of austerity on vote intention for SYRIZA – the senior coalition government partner at the time – despite the failed outcome of the government's bailout negotiations.

The electoral consequences of the Great Recession are analysed in this article by combining insights from economic voting theories and the literature on party system change. Taking cues from these two theoretical perspectives, the impact of the Great Recession on the stability and change of Western, Central and Eastern European party systems is assessed. The article starts from the premise that, in order to fully assess the impact of the contemporary crisis, classic economic voting hypotheses focused on incumbent parties need to be combined with accounts of long‐term party system change provided by realignment and dealignment theories. The empirical analysis draws on an original dataset of election results and economic and political indicators in 30 European democracies. The results indicate that during the Great Recession economic strain was associated with sizable losses for incumbent parties and an increasing destabilisation of Western European party systems, while its impact was significantly weaker in Central and Eastern European countries, where political rather than economic failures appeared to be more relevant. In line with the realignment perspective, the results also reveal that in Western Europe populist radical right, radical left and non‐mainstream parties benefited the most from the economic hardship, while support for mainstream parties decreased further.

Does austerity influence incumbent support? Existing studies struggle with conceptualizing the evolution of austerity's impact over time, estimating a causal effect, and analysing the reactions of different voters. This study theorizes that the effect of austerity on electoral preferences is not immediate, but gradual, as voters find out about the measures' consequences via the media. It leverages a survey in the field at the time of the austerity announcement in Romania in 2010, additional survey data collected immediately after this event and comprehensive daily media coverage to show that austerity measures do not have an immediate impact on incumbent support, anticipated turnout and expressing a vote preference. Instead, there is a gradual effect that is associated with increased media attention to budgetary cuts. This natural experiment allows the estimation of the immediate causal effect of austerity on electoral intentions. Difference‐in‐differences (DID) models show that the announcement triggered a massive loss of support for the incumbent among those who had voted for the party in power only a few months before. Austerity also led to the demobilization of the governing party's supporters. There is no evidence that those most directly affected by the spending cuts are more likely to punish the incumbent party.

A large number of young adults still live with their parents because they have difficulties entering the job market, because of low wages, or the cost of housing. Despite much research in social science on the consequences of this salient social trend, we lack an understanding of its implications for public opinion. This research note fills this gap by investigating whether such living arrangements between working age children and their parents is correlated with household members' political stances. Specifically, I expect that the anxiety induced by seeing their children having difficulties to become independent will lead parents to hold more negatives political stances, while the same outcome is expected from working age children who failed to fly the nest compared to their independent peers. Using data from the European Social Survey in 32 countries covering the period between 2002 and 2016, I show that, for both parents and young adults, cohabitation is associated with negative evaluations of the national economy and of the government's performance. Studies that do not take into account the situation of other household members might miss an important part of the opinion formation puzzle.

This article links the consequences of the Great Recession on protest and electoral politics. It innovates by combining the literature on economic voting with social movement research and by presenting the first integrated, large‐scale empirical analysis of protest mobilisation and electoral outcomes in Europe. The economic voting literature offers important insights on how and under what conditions economic crises play out in the short‐run. However, it tends to ignore the closely connected dynamics of opposition in the two arenas and the role of protests in politicising economic grievances. More specifically, it is argued that economic protests act as a ‘signalling mechanism’ by attributing blame to decision makers and by highlighting the political dimension of deteriorating economic conditions. Ultimately, massive protest mobilisation should, thus, amplify the impact of economic hardship on the electoral losses of incumbents and mainstream parties more generally. The empirical analysis to study this relationship relies on an original semi‐automated protest event dataset combined with an updated dataset of electoral outcomes in 30 European countries from 2000 to 2015. The results indicate that the dynamics of economic protests and electoral punishment are closely related and point to a destabilisation of European party systems during the Great Recession.

Voters who perceive the economy to be weak are generally less likely to support the incumbent government. Yet there is a debate over whether all people respond equally to economic shifts or if the state of the economy is more salient for those who feel economically vulnerable. This article examines whether insecure employment situations and employability concerns strengthen responses to the government's economic record. Data from Latin America and Eastern Europe confirm that workers who feel anxious about being fired or who believe it would be difficult to find a new job place significantly greater weight on sociotropic evaluations than do those with more secure employment situations. Thus incumbents who create risks for vulnerable workers are sanctioned, while those who create opportunities are rewarded most.

Who benefits from deep economic crises: the left, the right or neither? On the basis of evidence from elections in 1929–1933 and 2008–2013 in all states that were democracies in both periods, it is argued in this article that the electoral consequences of the Great Depression and the Great Recession were surprisingly similar: in both periods, right‐wing parties were at first more successful than left‐wing parties, although this effect only lasted for a few years. The manner in which a crisis develops over time should be taken into account when examining the effects of deep economic downturns on the electoral fortunes of the left and the right.

The economic voting literature shows that good economic performance bolsters the electoral prospects of incumbents. However, disagreement persists as to whether voters in vulnerable economic conditions are more likely to engage in economic voting. It is argued in this article that a crucial factor in explaining individual‐level variation in economic voting is the degree of exposure to economic risks, because risk exposure affects the saliency of the economy in voting decisions. In particular, the focus is on job insecurity and employability as key determinants of economic voting patterns. The article hypothesises that the extent of economic voting is greater in voters who are more vulnerable to unemployment and less employable in case of job loss. Support for these hypotheses is found in a test with a dataset that combines survey data on incumbent support with occupational unemployment rates and other measures of exposure to economic risks.

While the economic vote exists in Western democracies, the question of its stability remains a subject of controversy. This article focuses on two possible factors behind the instability observed: the endogeneity problem and the restricted variance problem. The former concerns the influence of partisan thinking on economic perception, while the latter concerns the influence of economic crisis, when virtually all voters may perceive a bad economy. These problems are examined using panel data from the Spanish national elections of 2008 and 2011. After various causality tests, it is concluded that the economic vote was influential in both contests, but apparently less so in 2011. It is shown in the article that the initial 2011 result misleads because of the statistical artifact presented by the restricted variance problem. Thus, an alternative strategy for exogenising economic perceptions is developed using aggregate economic measures in a pooled cross‐sectional design whereby it is demonstrated that the economy mattered greatly under the economic crisis of 2011. This estimation strategy could be applicable to other Western democracies experiencing such economic crisis.

Although the theory of retrospective voting receives wide support in the literature on voting behaviour, less agreement exists on voters’ time horizon when assessing the government's performance – that is, whether voters are myopic. Previous studies on voter myopia tend to focus on aggregate‐level measures of the economy, or use an experimental approach. Using panel data, this article offers the first investigation into voter myopia that uses individual‐level evaluations of government performance in a representative survey at several points during the electoral cycle. The study focuses on The Netherlands, but it also provide tests of the generalisability and robustness of the findings, and a replication in the American context. The results indicate that voter satisfaction early in the government's term adds to explaining incumbent voting. Thus, rather than the myopic voter, evidence is found of the abiding voter – steady at her or his post, evaluating government performance over a long length of time.

Recent literature has shown that the long established link between economic performance and electoral outcomes is conditioned by a country's institutions and government, what is often termed ‘clarity of responsibility’. In this article two distinct dimensions of the clarity of the political context are identified: institutional and government clarity. The first captures the formal dispersion of government power, both horizontally and vertically. The second captures the cohesion of the incumbent government. Analysing survey data from 27 European countries, it is shown that voters' ability to hold governments to account, for both the economy and management of public services, is primarily influenced by the extent to which there is an identifiable and cohesive incumbent, whereas formal institutional rules have no direct impact on performance voting.

This study investigates the impact of inflation on the 2022 US mid-term elections, a period witnessing the resurgence of inflation as a major concern in the USA for the first time in decades. We develop a pre-registered survey with an embedded experiment to examine the political repercussions of rising prices. We find that individuals experiencing a higher personal inflation burden are more inclined to support Republican candidates. Our survey experiment further assesses the impact of partisan messaging leading up to the election, focusing on two primary narratives: government spending, as emphasized by Republicans, and corporate greed, highlighted by Democrats. The results indicate that attributing inflation to government spending decreases support for Democrats, whereas associating it with corporate greed undermines confidence in the Republicans’ ability to effectively manage inflation. Economic voting behaviour depends not only on objective economic conditions but also on how political parties subjectively frame these conditions.

In an era of intergenerational inequality and political polarization, what might make older voters support greater government spending on the young? Building on literature concerning family-centric political preferences, we theorize that older voters support pro-youth policies and vote for pro-youth parties when they perceive younger relatives to be struggling financially due to emotional bonds and shared risks. Using a large, original survey of British adults, we find that negative evaluations of the financial wellbeing of one’s younger relatives – which are linked to their objective economic assets – are associated with support and prioritization of state investment in education, childcare and housing. They are also associated with opposition to the incumbent Conservatives, in a relationship mediated by assessments that this party represents young people badly. The implications are important for understanding how emotional connections, more than self-interest, sensitize voters to family-wide economic hardship and help produce ‘family-centric’ economic voting.

Research has found that asset accumulation is associated with vote preferences, with those with a high number and value of assets being more likely to vote for centre-right parties. Yet the bulk of this literature often falls short of accounting for alternative mechanisms that could be driving this relationship. In this letter, we investigate the association between patrimony and the vote longitudinally, assessing the effects of within-person changes in patrimony on party support. Drawing on an 11-year panel from Britain, our results indicate that patrimony, whether measured by the number of assets one owns or the total value of these assets, is unrelated to support for the Conservative Party. This finding is solid against several robustness tests. Our data analysis suggests that patrimonial voting in Britain – as identified in prior research – may be driven primarily by pre-existing differences between asset owners and non-owners rather than the assets themselves.

How does polarized politics affect electoral accountability? In this paper, I investigate the impact of political polarization on two channels through which voters can sanction incumbents for poor policy outcomes: voting for the opposition and abstaining. Using presidential election results at the county level, I show that, under polarized environments, the number of voters punishing the incumbent party for poor economic performances decreases in both channels. Survey analyses confirm that as the perceived ideological distance between parties increases, partisans are less likely to (i) negatively evaluate the economy when their party holds the Presidency and (ii) among those who have a negative view of the economy, they are less likely to penalize their party for negative economic assessments. These results show that polarization affects economic evaluation and clouds the responsibility for economic conditions, decreasing voters’ willingness to sanction the incumbent party.

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.