The Economic Vote
This book proposes a competency model for explaining cross-national variation in economic voting: Rational voters condition their vote on the incumbent’s record of economic performance because this is the optimal way to identify and elect competent economic managers under conditions of uncertainty....
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| Format: | Book |
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Cambridge University Press
2008
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| Summary: | This book proposes a competency model for explaining cross-national variation in economic voting: Rational voters condition their vote on the incumbent’s record of economic performance because this is the optimal way to identify and elect competent economic managers under conditions of uncertainty. This model explores how political and economic institutions alter the quality of the signal that the previous economy provides about the competence of candidates. Both the rationality of voting in the competency model and its focus on the voter’s desire for competent economic management leads to a set of theoretical propositions that link variation in economic and political institutions to variability in the economic vote. We demonstrate that there is economic voting, that it varies significantly across political contexts and then we test the hypotheses derived from out theory. The data consist of 165 election studies conducted in 18 different countries over a 20 year time period. |
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