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The consequences of economic globalization on electoral outcomes have recently become a prominent topic of research. We complement the emerging literature on this topic by studying whether changes in a subnational region's trade competitiveness affect the incumbent's vote share in that region. Using a novel dataset that relates subnational trade competitiveness to election results in 29 countries over a 20‐year period, we show that this is indeed the case. We also show that this effect is most pronounced for elections where the clarity of responsibility is high. Finally, we find mixed evidence for a moderating effect of incumbents' economic ideology as a moderator. These findings also contribute to the broader economic voting literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the peak‐end rule to economic voting, finding that voters focus on peak and end economic growth when evaluating incumbents. Cross‐national data from 595 elections in 70 countries (1960–2020) shows that the average of the highest GDP growth rate during the term and the growth rate in the election year positively impacts incumbent vote share, with peak growth having a stronger effect. Instrumental variable analysis addresses endogeneity. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that less‐educated voters rely more on the peak‐end rule. The findings contribute to understanding voters' behavioral patterns and improving democratic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous literature has shown that voters' biased beliefs regarding policy outcomes incentivize the selection of seemingly better, but socially worse, policies. It has also shown that voters' tendency to gauge an incumbent's competence by the present state of the economy (retrospective voting) could counteract biased beliefs. In this article, we argue that, when the advantageous consequences of a measure of policy only accrue with considerable lag (the down-up problem), retrospective voting instead amplifies the effects of biased beliefs. Still, we find that it may nevertheless be optimal for an incumbent to select good long-term policies if the incumbent is strongly motivated by the success of the chosen policies. Finally, we investigate the robustness of these conclusions by considering an incumbent bias, limited accountability, and the introduction of incentive and threshold contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has had tremendous impacts on political, economic and social developments across the globe. Although some studies show that voters tend to hold incumbent parties accountable for managing the pandemic, the results of others suggest that the rally-round-the-flag strategy might be at plan. We contend that voters tend to hold the incumbent party accountable, even during an exogenous shock, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesize that more stringent government responses to tackle the pandemic and more COVID-19 casualties tend to decrease the electoral support for incumbent parties. Using original data from 67 national elections in 56 electoral democracies from mid-March 2020 to May 2022, the empirical results support our hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Turkish economy presented a complicated picture ahead of the 2023 election, with significant currency depreciation and soaring inflation yet robust growth and stable employment levels. How did voters' economic perceptions shape election results in such a context? Drawing on Turkish Election Study surveys, this study reaches two main conclusions. First, while the average evaluation of the economy in the electorate was quite poor, there is a sharp divergence across incumbent supporters and others: The incumbent Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) supporters' evaluations have changed little since the previous election in 2018, yet those of other voters have deteriorated significantly. Second, the opposition seems to have failed in convincing large parts of the electorate that they would manage the economy better than Erdoğan. Overall, economic voting appears to have worked as expected, and the unwavering economic evaluations of likely AKP voters and the perceived incompetence of the opposition seem to have helped Erdoğan to win another term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Papers: Revista de Sociologia is the property of Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

How do voters react to an ongoing natural threat? Do voters sanction or reward incumbents even when incumbents cannot be held accountable because an unforeseeable natural disaster is unfolding? We address this question by investigating voters' reactions to the early spread of COVID-19 in the 2020 French municipal elections. Using a novel, fine-grained measure of the circulation of the virus based on excess-mortality data, we find that support for incumbents increased in areas that were particularly hard hit by the virus. Incumbents from both left and right gained votes in areas more strongly affected by COVID-19. We provide suggestive evidence for two mechanisms that can explain our findings: an emotional channel related to feelings of fear and anxiety, and a prospective-voting channel, related to the ability of incumbents to act more swiftly against the diffusion of the virus than challengers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies have documented incumbency advantage for electoral candidates. A largely unrelated strand of literature has shown that perceived competence of candidates, as inferred from their physical appearance, also predicts their electoral success. We draw upon the framework of statistical discrimination and the dual‐system theory of human cognition to understand the relationship between a political candidate's vote share, physical appearance, and incumbency status. Voters possess relatively richer information about incumbents compared to challengers. Perceived competence of candidates, as inferred from their physical appearance, is therefore expected to have a relatively weaker influence on voters' decisions to vote for incumbents. Data from Australian state elections support this prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature highlights the complexities of the relationship between voting, protest action and service delivery within Southern African democracies. We explore the relationship between these variables for South Africa by generating a new dataset from various sources. Although this relationship has been explored before, the existing evidence is mixed. The results from this study therefore bring a fresh perspective, especially at a time during which the political power of the incumbent African National Congress has been declining. We find that improvements in service delivery are not significantly associated with an increase in votes for the incumbent party, indicating that accountability is not the main motivation for South Africans' voting decisions. However, we find a statistically significant negative correlation between protest action and service delivery, providing evidence of the increasing importance of protest action as a form of political accountability in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While economic voting theory assumes that voters respond to economic conditions, critics have argued that most voters lack an adequate understanding of key national economic indicators. In this paper, we investigate the occurrence of a neighbourhood effect, where citizens can observe unemployment levels in their own local communities. Using both official statistics and survey data of three recent election studies in Belgium, we assess whether local unemployment levels are associated with the assessment of the national economy, and incumbent voting. While the results show that the local unemployment level is strongly associated with the assessment of the national economy, results regarding a direct association with supporting incumbent political parties are mixed. We argue that the neighbourhood effect is an important mechanism in economic voting, as citizens react to a neighbourhood effect in their assessment of the state of the national economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early presidential elections in Uzbekistan on July 9th, incumbent Shavkat Mirziyoyev was confirmed as the winner with 13.6 million votes (87 percent). Mirziyoyev aims to implement comprehensive reforms in the country to promote economic development and improve relations with neighboring states. The idea of a constitutional reform has also been discussed to reflect the current developments in the country. President Mirziyoyev's reforms have led to significant changes in Uzbekistan, including the electoral process. The Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan temporarily lost its autonomy rights, leading to demonstrations, but President Mirziyoyev promised to restore them. [Extracted from the article]

We examine the joint response to political uncertainty along two margins: changes in real activity and voluntary disclosure. We focus on within‐firm variation in exposure to ex ante competitive U.S. gubernatorial elections using data on preelection poll margins and firms' state exposures. Despite real activity falling in the years leading up to a close election, we find that voluntary disclosure increases both in frequency and content, including mentions of risk in filings that reference states holding elections. Our tests use a decomposition of 8‐K filings into real activity and voluntary disclosure to address the endogenous complementarity between these two responses. These results hold when using alternative ex ante measures of political uncertainty based on term‐limited incumbents, historically competitive offices, or state legislature gridlock. Both effects of political uncertainty are stronger for firms in highly regulated industries and weaker for those least exposed to the local market, linking the real activity and disclosure responses to uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the outcome of the July 2023 election in Spain. Despite the right- and far-right bloc winning a higher share of the votes, the two main incumbent parties on the left (PSOE and Sumar) defeated the odds and returned to government thanks to a post-election agreement with six other parties, including the Catalan pro-independence political formations. We show how coordination in the left bloc was important in shaping the outcome. An increase in mobilisation and strategic voting across districts contributed to preventing the right-wing bloc from achieving an absolute majority of seats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of COVID-19 sparked debates about whether incumbents should focus on saving lives or the economy. Politicians' decisions in this dilemma could determine whether they remain in office. "Saving the economy" is predicted to affect re-election chances positively in economic voting theory. However, a public health crisis can shift the electorate's preferences in favor of expanding healthcare support at the cost of the economy. We examine whether there is a trade-off between "saving lives" and "saving the economy" for the incumbent in receiving higher political support. Based on two experiments conducted in Russia, we measure if individuals are more likely to support, vote for, and extend the power of the incumbent based on their policies. Although both experimental factors encouraged support, the economy-driven policy had a larger effect on voting than the healthcare-driven one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beckley was likely the author of the 29October letter to Fenno rebutting Phocion's depiction ofJefferson's conduct as governor of Virginia (seeaccompanying footnote in "Depositions Taken in 1796respecting Jefferson's Conduct during Arnold's Invasion,"Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 4:271-73). With Smith, however,Phocion's entire strategy for 1796 depended uponpresenting a strident defense of slavery as an intendedsafeguard against Jefferson's philosophicalindulgences.37 The execution of the Federalists' intended electoralvote-parsing maneuver finds support well beyond itsimplicit place in Phocion's text. Based on the electoralobjectives of the Federalists, this discussion wasprecisely the type of section aligned second-guessingthat Phocion intended to foment among Jefferson'sRepublicans.11 To build their case, Phocion's letters offered aremarkable and often biting commentary on Jefferson'spersonal relations to slavery. [Extracted from the article]

If a transfers policy is programmatic (it is transparent and nonmanipulable), is it irrelevant for politicians' electoral fortunes? I show that the answer is negative using a political agency model with symmetric uncertainty. In my setup, an incumbent can allocate a budget to public goods and transfers. While the payoffs from transfers tend to be permanent, the payoffs from public good provision tend to depend on the incumbent's competence. When the incumbent increases the budget to public goods, two effects arise: his performance in office today reveals more information about his identity (an informativeness effect) and voters' anticipation of narrow transfers tomorrow increases the salience of political selection (a stakes effect). I show how the incumbent strategically takes into account these two effects in view of maximizing his electoral fortunes and detail how these theoretical findings can inform empirical analyses of the electoral consequences of programmatic transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrorism often seeks to impact democratic politics. This article explores how it can influence the electoral fortunes of the incumbent. Existing research is contradictory. Models of retrospective voting predict a negative impact, as terrorism is detrimental to voters' welfare. However, the well-known 'rally around the flag' effect suggests otherwise: following a terrorist attack, voters often cling to the incumbent. We reconcile these arguments and argue that while both effects can coexist, the retrospective assessment is more durable than the rally around the flag. Using data on all deadly domestic terrorist attacks in Spain between 1977 and 2008, matched with municipal-level national election results, we show how exposure to strikes that occur during the last quarter of the term benefit the incumbent, while more temporally distant attacks are electorally harmful. In line with our theory, we find a more pronounced temporal heterogeneity for indiscriminate attacks and those that target civilians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does exposure to aerial bombing influence voting for the target country's leadership? Do voters tend to punish incumbents for policy failure? These questions are relevant for understanding the target country's postwar politics because aerial bombing remains one of the deadliest and most widely used military options for coercive bargaining. Despite the historical and contemporary relevance of these questions, there are only a few studies in the air-power literature arguing that strategic bombing produces a temporary rally effect but no subsequent political consequences other than political apathy. Most studies ignore important variation within states even though leadership responsibility can vary tremendously on the substate level. This article analyzes the effect of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on Serbian local elections using the difference-in-differences identification strategy and identifies the effect of airstrikes on the vote-share of Slobodan Milosevic's regime. The results show that the regime's vote-share is 2.6% lower in municipalities exposed to the bombing. Challenging prior studies, this finding demonstrates that retrospective voting applies to aerial bombing even in competitive authoritarian regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presidents have access to a range of resources unavailable to challengers, and often the most important are derived from control of the state. This allows incumbents to build more inclusive elite coalitions, distribute clientelist resources to their political base and co-opt opposition politicians. Cabinet and government appointments are some of the most visible, direct and identifiable indications of elite accommodation, and African presidents are more likely to build inclusive coalitions to ensure their survival. In Zambia, balanced regional representation – popularly known as "tribal balancing" – has held an important place in the public imagination. But between 2015 and 2021, rather than using incumbent advantage to build an ethnically inclusive alliance, President Lungu used cabinet appointments and senior government positions to shore up his base. This was bolstered by an exclusionary campaign that focused on the opposition leader's ethnicity to push the PF's base to vote against the opposition. This article uses an analysis of cabinet appointments and coverage of the election campaign to illustrate how Lungu sought to build an exclusionary coalition and exacerbate ethnic cleavages. This contributes to debates on when and why elites might use exclusionary strategies, and when they might fail to produce the desired outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Might incumbency entail disadvantages as well as advantages? This article examines the performance of incumbent president Edgar Lungu and the Patriotic Front (PF) in Zambia's Eastern Province in the 2021 election. Eastern Province was a 'swing' region in that neither of the two major national political parties had deep-rooted support, despite Lungu's and the PF's strong performance in 2015-16. Survey data shows that voters punished the incumbent government in 2021 for its poor management of the economy (and, to a lesser extent, corruption). Interviews with provincial politicians and documentary sources reveal the challenges facing the incumbent in maintaining the coalition that had brought it electoral success in 2015-16. The case of Eastern Province illustrates how, in such swing regions, incumbency can be a disadvantage as well as an advantage, as the incumbent president is held responsible for the state of the economy and the opportunities to local elites. In countries where national electoral success requires winning decisively in such swing regions, even incumbent presidents and parties face a significant possibility of electoral defeat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the existence of electoral cycles in GDP growth forecasts released by governments. In a theoretical model of political selection, we show that governments release overly optimistic GDP growth forecasts ahead of elections to increase the reelection probability. The bias arises from lack of commitment if voters are rational and from manipulation of voters' beliefs if they do not expect the incumbent to be biased. Using high-frequency forecaster-level data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, we document that governments overestimate short-term real GDP growth by 0.1–0.3 percentage points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do citizens punish elected politicians for corruption carried out by unelected bureaucrats? Most studies of corruption punishment focus on accusations against politicians. We argue that the direct, and therefore undeniable, experience of corruption at the hands of street‐level bureaucrats will lead citizens to punish national incumbents. We explore whether this punishment of corruption is mitigated in circumstances where voters believe that politicians have less control over bureaucrats. We combine cross‐national survey data on corruption victimization and political behavior in a sample of 60 countries from Africa and Latin America. We find a robust, negative effect of personal corruption victimization on vote intention. Surprisingly, we do not identify any significant country‐level predictors of the strength of this relationship, nor do we find evidence of systematic differences in how copartisans respond to bureaucratic corruption relative to noncopartisans. Our paper contributes to the growing literature on how interaction with street‐level bureaucrats drives political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines the asymmetric marginal effect of economic variables on voting. By applying the comprehensive cross-country panel data of democracies from 1975 to 2016, the empirical results demonstrate that there is a striking discontinuity in the relationship between economic performance and political turnover, in the sense that voters are sensitive to incumbents' economic performance when the countries are during the economic prosperity but are less sensitive during the economic recession. The results are robust no matter we use the absolute growth rate or relative growth rate of the country, and no matter voters' reaction in response to political turnover is conditional on the institutional factor or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do perceptions of insecurity from politically motivated violence affect the decision of poor voters to re-elect incumbents in Indian elections? This article examines this question in the empirical context of the Maoist-affected Junglemahal region in the state of West Bengal in eastern India. Exploiting original survey data collected in 38 Maoist-affected villages in Junglemahal prior to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, I show that respondents (a) were able to discriminate between politically motivated violence and other governance-related issues, (b) were more inclined to vote for the incumbent the greater the importance attached to the provision of public goods, but (c) were less inclined to vote for the incumbent the greater the importance attached to politically motivated violence. In auxiliary tests, I find that the effect of the perceived threat from politically motivated violence was mediated by feelings of fear, anger, and worry about the general direction in which the state was going. I also present evidence showing a positive relationship between the level of campaign contact by the opposition party and the level of negative emotions experienced by voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research provides evidence that voters’ consider governments’ past performance, little is known about which information voters pay attention to. We suggest two competing theories of retrospective voting: Outcome-oriented voters only react to the policy outcome, whereas position-oriented voters consider the initial proposal as informative of the incumbent’s policy position and punish them for the unpopular idea. We test these opposing mechanisms using the case of widely unpopular school closures and originally compiled granular data on Swedish local elections results from 2002 to 2018. We exploit within municipality variation in voting across time to causally estimate the consequences for incumbents in the neighborhood surrounding the schools. Our results confirm that voters punish incumbents for closing a school but also for withdrawing the proposal: they vote position-oriented. Our findings have implications for the understanding of retrospective voting and which information cues voters look back to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen several 100-year anniversaries of the women's vote, and today universal and equal suffrage is an inseparable part of democracy. Dawn Teele's book, Forging the Franchise, is an inquiry into the reasons why male politicians elected by male voters gave women the right to vote in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. It offers a theory of the political origins that focuses on electoral expediency and mobilization of women's groups and it provides quantitative evidence from the three countries. It argues that women got the right to vote when the incumbents saw and needed an electoral advantage of expanding the right to vote to females. The book is of interest not only to those who want a deeper understanding of the historical process of women's enfranchisement or who are interested in the political economy of democratization, but to everyone with a concern about gender inequality in politics today. (JEL D72, E16, J16, N30, N40) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging body of evidence suggests a causal relationship between wellbeing and incumbent voting. However, the evidence is primarily founded upon established democracies with regular turnovers of power. Moreover, the mechanism underlying this relationship is still relatively unknown. Using the intricacies of the Malaysian political context and Malaysian data from the seventh wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), this study examines the mediating role of trust in government to explain the relationship between life satisfaction and incumbent voting. Notably, the Malaysian WVS was concluded two weeks before Malaysia's fourteenth general election (GE14), which witnessed the end of the ruling coalition's six-decade hold on power since independence and subsequently ushered in the country's first-ever peaceful transfer of power. The empirical analysis indicated that the mediating role of trust in the relationship between life satisfaction and incumbent voting is supported. Further empirical analysis also showed that the mediating effect of trust was unique to the GE14 context compared to GE13, thus providing a better understanding of the role trust plays in the outcome of the election. The results provide valuable insights and implications in political science, especially for a nation emerging from its authoritarian state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the purported effects of international integration is that voters are less able, or less willing, to punish or reward incumbents for economic performance: since governments are less able to influence economic outcomes, economic considerations weigh less for voters at the ballot box. This would have serious implications for democratic legitimacy. Yet the balancing demands hypothesis predicts that voters compensate for this by judging incumbents on non-economic performance instead. In this article, this theory is critiqued theoretically and empirically, putting it to the test for one of the first times at the individual level using the 2019 Belgian Election Study. Combining perceptions of policy performance across six issue areas with novel survey items which measure perceptions of economic constraints, it is shown that whilst performance voting does occur, there is no support for the balancing demands hypothesis. Voting based on performance in economic or non-economic areas remains largely unrelated to perceptions of international constraints. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1953850. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aims to characterize the optimal time path of a political business cycle model adapted to fiscal policy restrictions currently applied in Brazil. In this model, the incumbent seeks to maximize his utility, that is a weighted sum of the utility of voting support and the disutility of deviations from the ideal allocation of social spending. The voting function has been separated into two components: the government's attrition and its approval, which varies positively with the increase in health and education expenses, whose proportion was used as a restricted control. The model's solution, using the optimal control technique, provides the optimal trajectories of social spending and the government's voting intentions. Also are stated the sufficient conditions to result in a lower allocation of social expenditures at the beginning of the term, with an initially decreasing and later increasing voting intention, in accordance with the results in the empirical literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the 15 elections that took place between 2010 and 2019 in four South European countries – Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain – through the lenses of the retrospective vote theory. The large within-country variation of economic conditions justifies the adoption of an original subnational perspective, while the explicit test of alternative economic quantities and horizons provides a more credible assessment of voters' behaviours. Besides offering a taxonomy of local retrospective voting, the research found that citizens assessed the incumbents against regional unemployment levels and national growth dynamics, further benchmarking the local economic conditions against their past performances. These results give credit to the idea that the South European electorate shares similar references in assessing the economic competences of incumbent governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that voters prefer parties whose policy positions align with their own. But do voters actually reward incumbents who implement policies preferred by the electorate? Using cross-country data covering more than 350 elections and opinion-policy congruence measures based on 166 issues, our analysis reveals an unexpected non-correlation between opinion-policy congruence and electoral success. Governments that implement (or keep in place) policies with higher levels of support in the electorate do not do better in subsequent elections. This result holds when controlling for the state of the economy, and when using other, country-specific, datasets. The study reinforces conclusions from previous research that retrospective policy voting seems to be very limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, Alaskans voted to adopt a nonpartisan top-4 primary followed by a ranked-choice general election. Proposals for “final four” and “final five” election systems are being considered in other states, as well as ranked-choice voting. The initial use of Alaska’s procedure in 2022 serves as a test case for examining whether such reforms may help moderate candidates avoid being “primaried.” In 2022, incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski held her seat against a Trump-endorsed Republican, Kelly Tshibaka. We use data from the 2022 election in Alaska, along with a mixed-mode survey of Alaskan voters before the general election, to test hypotheses about how voters behave in these kinds of elections, finding: (1) the moderate Republican candidate, Murkowski, likely would have lost a closed partisan primary; (2) some Democrats and independents favored the moderate Republican over the candidate of their own party, and the new rules allowed them to support her at all stages of the election, along with others who voted for her to stop the more conservative Republican candidate; and (3) that Alaskan voters are largely favorable toward the new rules, but that certain kinds of populist voters are likely to both support Trump and oppose the rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primary challenges are semi-regular occurrences for incumbent members of Congress, and while many of these primary challengers never pose a serious threat to the incumbent, there are occasions when the incumbent faces a difficult primary challenge. How do incumbent members of Congress, particularly members of the Senate, act in response to primary challengers? This study examines the impact a primary challenger has on the voting behavior of incumbent senators to determine if incumbents change how they vote in Congress to counter their primary threat. In response to a primary challenger incumbent I find that senators shift their voting behavior and vote more often with their party's leadership, but this is conditional on the threat-level posed by the primary challenger. High-quality primary challengers elicit the greatest shift in the incumbent's behavior, according to this study. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07343469.2021.1922541. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does globalization affect politics? One of the most controversial aspects of globalization is offshoring, when manufacturing operations and business functions move abroad. Although voters generally dislike offshoring, it remains unclear how moving jobs abroad impacts democratic elections. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, the author finds that incumbent government parties lose more votes in municipalities where a local plant moved production abroad between elections than in municipalities that did not experience such an event. The result holds across various time periods, different incumbent parties and diverse types of elections. In both national and regional elections, voters punish incumbent government parties when a local firm moves production abroad. Incumbent parties' vote shares fall as the number of jobs lost due to offshoring increases. In multiparty governments, voters disproportionately punish the largest coalition party for offshoring. The results of an original survey administered in Spain verify the importance of offshoring for voters' retrospective evaluations of incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the effect of economic growth on executive elections in the context of a multilevel governance structure and how party ties across federal, state, and local levels affect the relationship, using data from Brazilian municipalities. We test the hypothesis that the president is the main politician accountable for economic performance, measured by local growth, and that party politics moderates the evaluation of the economic performance of state governors and the president. Our research shows that there is a high degree of interdependence between levels of government in the evaluation of economic performance. We highlight how party alliances strongly moderate the economic performance effects at the different levels. Using aggregate local level‐municipality panel data and fixed effects estimations, we show that the previous year's economic growth positively impacts the percentage of votes obtained by the incumbent in the presidential elections and that those effects are higher in states whose governors are allied to the president. Related Articles: Ondetti, Gabriel. 2008. "Up and Down with the Agrarian Question: Issue Attention and Land Reform in Contemporary Brazil." Politics & Policy 36(4): 510–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2008.00120.x Segatto, Catarina Ianni, and Daniel Béland. 2018. "The Limits of Partisanship: Federalism, the Role of Bureaucrats, and the Path to Universal Health Care Coverage in Brazil." Politics & Policy 46(3): 416–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12252 Zimerman, Artur, and Flávio Pinheiro. 2020. "Appearances can be Deceptive: Political Polarization, Agrarian Policy, and Coalitional Presidentialism in Brazil." Politics & Policy 48(2): 339–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12345 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that a country's institutional features can weaken economic voting because voters find it hard to attribute performance to specific parties. We argue that local-level party system institutionalization similarly moderates the link between the economy and vote choice. We focus on one manifestation of party system institutionalization: the strength of party-candidate linkages in elections, operationalized by manually tracing the rerunning patterns of some 80,000 candidates in Indian state elections between 1986 and 2007. Using rerunning patterns to measure party-candidate linkages and rainfall data to measure the state of the economy, we show that voters were more likely to reward incumbent parties for economic performance when parties and candidates were aligned in consecutive elections. We address concerns of endogeneity in rerunning patterns, by showing that the results are robust to alternate measures of local-level party system institutionalization. They are also robust to alternative measures of the state of the economy and to using individual-level survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Great Recession, exceptionally harsh economic conditions were often countered by austerity policies that, according to many, further worsened and protracted the negative conjuncture. Both elements, the poor state of the economy and the contractionary manoeuvers, are supposed to reduce the electoral prospects for incumbents. In this article, we compare the relative explanatory powers of these two theories before and during the economic crisis. We demonstrate that in normal times citizens are fiscally responsible, whereas during the Great Recession, and under certain conditions, austerity policies systematically reduced the support for incumbents on top of the state of the economy. This happened when the burdens of the manoeuvers were shared by many, in more equal societies, when the country was constrained by external conditionalities and when readjustments were mostly based on tax increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do incumbents dominate non-partisan elections because of an especially large personal vote? This question has important implications for understanding the causes of incumbent success and the benefits or drawbacks of non-partisan elections. This paper uses a natural experiment, combined with three original datasets, to estimate the size, persistence, and consequences of the personal vote in a large non-partisan city election. We first use individual-level survey data to show that individuals assigned quasi-randomly to a new incumbent are substantially less likely to support the incumbent. We use a second survey, one year later, to demonstrate the persistence of this effect. Finally, we use historical election results to simulate the electoral consequences of the personal vote; we find that the personal vote is sufficiently large to affect one in four incumbent races. We conclude that the personal vote, while large and important, is not sufficient to explain incumbent dominance in non-partisan contests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The main objective of the study is to distinguish the often‐used concepts and measures of retrospective (economic) performance voting. I argue that concepts that have been used synonymously—such as performance voting, retrospective voting, and economic voting—should be distinguished theoretically and empirically, as they address different phenomena. Methods: I use the data of the fifth module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems to test differences in the correlates and effects of general retrospective performance evaluations and retrospective evaluations of the economy on incumbent voting. Results: Both measures are associated with other valence evaluations and economic evaluations with the personal economic situation. Both measures significantly explain incumbent voting, but the effects of the general retrospective performance measure are stronger. Conclusion: By distinguishing different concepts, theoretical confusion can be avoided. Given the differences in correlates and effect sizes, future studies should select their empirical measures carefully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about electoral reform revolve around giving voters more choice. Consequently, reformers often favor adopting the single transferable vote, a candidate-based system that allows voters to rank order candidates. Nonetheless, studies about whether lower preferences (transfers) influence STV election outcomes remain scant. To address this gap, our comparative multivariate approach tests transfers' impact on election results in Ireland, Malta, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. We find that, on average, transfers are pivotal in the election of about one in 10 elected candidates. Hence, their impact is the exception rather than the norm. We show that when lower preferences are decisive at the candidate level, they benefit smaller and moderate parties and non-incumbents and, in Malta and Ireland, female candidates. Our results have implications for understanding the extent to which multiple preferences influence election outcomes and for debates on electoral reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Sociologia e Política is the property of Revista de Sociologia e Politica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

At face, Ireland's economy had staged a remarkable recovery by 2020 since the devastating impact of the Global Financial Crisis. The economy was the fastest growing in Europe, unemployment had reached record lows, and Ireland's debt was back to its lowest level since 2009. The traditional economic voting model assumes voters punish outgoing governments for poor economic performance by voting against them but rewards incumbents for a sound economy by voting for them. Nevertheless, Irish voters delivered a stunning rebuke to the Fine Gael government in 2020, registering an incumbent administration's sixth-worst performance since 1932, raising questions about the applicability of the economic vote. Using the 2020 Irish National Election Study, our contribution unpacks this apparent puzzle. We uncover that macroeconomic conditions were less rosy than at first sight, a pattern recognised by voters. We find the economic vote was alive and well, with voter economic perceptions, and their views on income redistribution (and taxes/spending) having a potent effect on the vote. Brexit, as an economic issue, however, was not influential in shaping the vote. The Fine Gael challenge, and the answer to the conundrum, was most voters perceived the economy was lackluster and the government was on the wrong side of economic policy preferences of most voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]