Search

While political accountability requires that voters can form an accurate picture of government performance, public evaluations of government performance in established democracies are often distorted by partisan considerations. We test whether the same factors bias evaluations of government performance in a new democracy where partisanship is less stable and defined. This analysis estimates individual-level models of retrospective national economic evaluations in South Korea's 2017 presidential election. South Korea has unstable party politics, low levels of party institutionalization, and high levels of public distrust in political parties. Yet even in this context we find that voters' economic evaluations are significantly affected by political loyalties such as party identification. This endogeneity is sufficiently large that it results in aggregate consumer evaluations of the economy that systematically vary across regions depending upon the relationship of the president to that region. The findings confirm that party identification shapes citizen opinions even in a context where its effect would likely be weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association between how citizens perceive economic performance, insecurity, or corruption and how they evaluate the president varies systematically across Latin American countries and within them over time. In particular, while presidential popularity reflects these outcomes in the average Latin American country, survey data from 2006–17 confirm that the connection between government performance and presidential approval is generally stronger when unfragmented party systems or single-party majority governments make assessments of political responsibility easier. While these results suggest that the region's citizens do not blindly blame the president for outcomes where political responsibility should be shared, they also remind us that there are many countries in the region where fragmented party systems weaken the conditions for effective political accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: There is an ongoing debate within the economic voting literature about whether the economy's salience systematically fluctuates over time or is constant. The recent global economic slowdown provides leverage to test the proposition that voters give greater weight to economic performance when it is weak. Data on voters' issue priorities from 2000 to 2011 shows that voters were more likely to consider the economy an important issue during periods of bad or volatile economic performance. A weak economy also focuses voter attention on corruption and crime while reducing attention to social policy and foreign affairs. Crime rates, terrorist attacks, globalization, and the level of development also affect the economy's place on the electoral agenda. Thus one impact of the recent financial downturn was a shift toward economic voting in countries where it was deepest. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Economic perceptions affect incumbent support, but debate persists over whether voters focus on past or future performance and whether they view the economy in primarily sociotropic or egotropic terms. We theorize the nature of economic voting depends on the context. Evidence from 18 Latin American countries (1995–2009) suggest prospective voting predominates early in the election cycle, but retrospective voting gains traction as the incumbent’s record develops. Voters emphasize the national economy over personal finances except in the least developed countries. Thus the contexts in which voters are embedded not only affect the degree of economic voting but also its very nature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies linking election outcomes to economics frequently assume that the economy’s salience is constant. This study shows that the economy’s salience systematically fluctuates. The number of voters focused on economic issues shifted dramatically throughout the 2008 campaign as the recession worsened and this change occurred well before the financial markets collapsed in September 2008. However, even during the recession substantial numbers of individuals said their vote was based on non-economic issues and for these individuals there was no relationship between their assessment of the economy and their electoral choice. Consistent with extant theories of issue attention, citizens who were the hardest hit by the recession and those who had the most anxiety about suffering a financial dislocation in the future were most likely to consider economic performance electorally important while secure voters were less likely to be economic voters. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]