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This paper is part of a larger project looking at the factors that cause some voters to place greater weight on economic concerns when evaluating the incumbent or voting. Here we argue that informal employment, working without a written contract with your employer, makes voters vulnerable to shifts in the job market by inducing wage volatility and increasing the ease of being dismissed while denying workers access to potential coping mechanisms during economic downturns such as severance pay, unemployment insurance, or pensions. The result, we predict, is that informally employed voters will place greater weight on national economic outcomes and capabilities to generate jobs when voting. We test this hypothesis with original survey data on approval of Argentine President Nestor Kirchner and Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo as well as of voting intentions in the 2006 Peruvian presidential elections. The implications of the growth of the informal sector on electorasl outcomes is then discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose that voters consider not only whether the absolute state of the economy has improved under an incumbent, but also include the distribution of economic benefits as an important basis for evaluating the competence of incumbent policy-makers. The extant literature on economic voting has largely only focused on questions of growth, unemployment, and inflation, but has overlooked how voter perceptions of inequality shape voter choices. In this paper, we outline the rationale for including changes in the distribution of wealth into voter evaluations of incumbents. We then model incumbent approval as a function of differences in voters' perceptions of levels of income inequality after controlling for known economic and social determinants of voting, using survey data collected in Argentina and Mexico. In both cases, voters were more likely to support incumbent presidents if when they perceived that economic inequality was diminishing. These preliminary results confirm that perceived inequalities are politically consequential. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]