Economic Policy Voting and Incumbency: Unemployment in Western Europe

Abstract

The economic voting literature has been dominated by the incumbency-oriented hypothesis, where voters reward or punish government at the ballot box according to economic performance.The alternative, policy-oriented hypothesis, where voters favor parties closest to their issue position, has been neglected in this literature. We explore policy voting with respect to an archetypal economic policy issue -unemployment. Voters who favor lower unemployment should tend to vote for left parties, since they "own" the issue. Examining a large time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) pool of Western European nations, we find some evidence for economic policy voting. However, it exists in a form conditioned by incumbency. According to varied tests, left incumbents actually experience a net electoral cost, if the unemployment rate climbs under their regime. Incumbency, then, serves to break any natural economic policy advantage that might accrue to the left due to the unemployment issue.

The Effect that Structural and Investment Funds have on Voter Behaviour in European Parliamentary Elections

“…Specifically, an increase of 10 percentage points in the incumbent vote share at time t -1, costs the incumbent almost 3 percentage points in the current election. An identical cost of ruling effect was demonstrated by Dassonville and Lewis-Beck (2013) in their analysis of macro-level economic voting in European elections. 5 When taken in conjunction with our SIF findings, this presents a scenario where national incumbent parties can expect to lose electoral support in EP elections, which is what the literature on second-order elections predicts will happen.…”

Liberal Leaders and Liberal Success: The Impact of Alternation

“…It seems ill advised to create an NDP leader variable, given that this happened only once and only at the very end of the series. 5 Kayser and Grafström's finding is echoed in Dassonneville and Lewis-Beck (2013), although the latter's focus is subtly different. 6 Nadeau and Blais (1993) treat 1958 and 1980 as borderline cases for the retrospective-voting logic of their model, in that the Conservative incumbents in each year had been in power for less than a year and so hardly qualify as responsible for the current state of the economy.…”

Labor Market Conditions and Partisan Voting: How Unemployment Hurts the Left

“…He further shows, using data at the county level, that Democratic candidates gain an electoral advantage when the unemployment rate rises. Dassonneville and Lewis-Beck (2013) test this hypothesis further, using cross-country data from Europe: they find that higher unemployment increases the voting share for left-wing parties in opposition, but that its effects approach zero when the left comes to exercise greater control over the government. In other words, these scholars argue that voters can dislike unemployment but turn to the left rather than against the government if they believe that fiscal stimulus generates jobs.…”

“…Some scholars accordingly argue that the economy is a partisan issue, in the sense that voters move along the left/right dimension as labor-market conditions change. Some argue that left-wing parties benefit from rising rates of unemployment because voters demand more government spending when economic conditions are harsh (Dassonneville and Lewis-Beck 2013;Wright 2012). Others contend that voters rally behind conservative parties during economic downturns, as citizens who are about to tighten their belts prefer to cut down on government spending as well (Stevenson 2001;Durr 1993)and especially to tone down post-material policies associated with the left (Kayser and Grafström 2016).…”