Ideology and Retrospection in Electoral Responses to the Great Recession

Abstract

I examine the outcomes of 31 parliamentary elections in 26 OECD countries in the period just before, during, and after the Great Recession (from 2007 through early 2011). I attempt to account for the outcomes of these elections on the basis of three factors: (1) economic conditions, (2) the general ideology of the incumbent party or coalition, and (3) specific policy choices in response to the economic crisis. My analyses suggest that voters consistently punished incumbent governments for bad economic conditions, with little apparent regard for the ideology of the government or global economic conditions at the time of the election. I find no evidence of consistent ideological shifts in response to the crisis, either to the left or to the right, but some evidence of electoral responses to specific fiscal policy choices-most notably, a boost in incumbent governments' electoral support associated with spending on economic stimulus programs. These general patterns are illustrated with brief case studies of elections in Spain and Portugal, Germany, and the United States. In general, my results underline the significance of retrospective voting even in periods of severe economic and political stress.

Bring the Poor Back In! Inequalities, Welfare and Politics

“…In the wake of the 2008 crisis, Europe has been swept by a massive wave of antiausterity protests and strikes, especially in Spain, Greece, Italy, and Portugal (Della Porta, 2012;Karamichas, 2012). But one notices no global shift towards the left, or the right, in the first postcrisis elections, just a tendency for voters to punish incumbents for hard times, in line with a simple retrospective voting model (Bartels, 2014;Kriesi, 2014). However, because these studies take the country as unit of analysis, they tell us little about the individuals a country is made of, and the different ways they experience and react to the recession.…”

Sources of Bias in Retrospective Decision Making: Experimental Evidence on Voters’ Limitations in Controlling Incumbents

“…Some find voters capable of complex signal extraction (Duch and Stevenson 2010;Ebeid and Rodden 2006;Kayser and Peress 2012), though others find failures (Achen and Bartels 2004b;Bartels 2011;Wolfers 2002). 31 Healy, Malhotra, and Mo (2010), for example, show that outcomes of college football games in the two weeks prior to an election influence Senate, gubernatorial, and presidential incumbent vote share in the counties in which the football teams reside.…”

Errors have been made, others will be blamed: issue engagement and blame shifting in Prime Minister speeches during the economic crisis in Europe

“…Examples of this are: PASOK, the Greek Socialist Party, that was all but annihilated in the May 2012 election, and, among others, Labour (UK, 2010), PSOE (Spain, 2011), CDA (Netherlands, 2010) and Venstre (Denmark, 2011) -all suffered major electoral losses and lost control of the government. Several studies indeed demonstrate that voters have punished their governments for the economic crisis and its consequences (Palmer and Whitten, 2011;Rattinger and Steinbrecher, 2011;Anderson and Hecht, 2012;Marsh and Mikhaylov, 2012;Nezi, 2012;Bartels, 2014;Fraile and Lewis-Beck, 2014;Kriesi, 2014;Dassonneville and Lewis-Beck, 2014). These findings fit into the larger framework of so-called economic voting.…”

“…Economic crises threaten the well-being of people, and they become better informed about the state of the economy (Krosnick 1990;Krosnick and Kinder 1990;Miller and Krosnick 2000), which increases the salience of the economy for voters in general (Singer 2011;Singer 2013;Traber et al 2018), and specifically for their voting decision (Gomez and Wilson 2006;Anderson 2007). Indeed, recent research confirms that economic voting took place during the recent economic crisis (Palmer and Whitten 2011;Rattinger and Steinbrecher 2011;Anderson and Hecht 2012;Bellucci et al 2012;Marsh and Mikhaylov 2012;Nezi 2012;Bartels 2014;Fraile and Lewis-Beck 2014;Kriesi 2014;Dassonneville and Lewis-Beck 2014).…”