Economic conditions shape election outcomes in the world's democracies. Good times keep parties in office, bad times cast them out. This proposition is robust, as the voluminous body of research reviewed here demonstrates. The strong findings at the macro level are founded on the economic voter, who holds the government responsible for economic performance, rewarding or punishing it at the ballot box. Although voters do not look exclusively at economic issues, they generally weigh those more heavily than any others, regardless of the democracy they vote in.

Research begins with a "problem" or topic. Thinking about the problem results in identifying concepts that capture the phenomenon being studied. Concepts, or CONSTRUCTS, are ideas that represent the phenomenon. Conceptualization is the process whereby these concepts are given theoretical meaning. The process typically involves defining the concepts abstractly in theoretical terms.

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In comparative politics, an established finding—that economic development fosters democratic performance—has recently come under challenge. We counter this challenge with a dynamic pooled time series analysis of a major, but neglected data set from 131 nations. The final generalized least squares-autoregressive moving averages estimates (N = 2,096) appear robust and indicate strong economic development effects, dependent in part on the nation's position in the world system. For the first time, rather hard evidence is offered on the causal relationship between economics and democracy. According to Granger tests, economic development “causes” democracy, but democracy does not “cause” economic development. Overall, the various tests would seem to advance sharply the modeling of democratic performance.

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National economic conditions regularly influence outcomes in U.S. presidential elections. However, beyond this simple finding, much remains unclear. How large are national economic effects? Which macroeconomic indicators? Subjective or objective measures? Retrospective or prospective? What is the role of institutions? In our analysis of the American National Election Studies, 1956-1996, we employ a National Business Index (NBI), an aggregate measure that amalgamates individual voter perceptions of the collective economy. It outperforms other national economic measures and reveals that effects have been underestimated. The assumption of strong retrospective economic voting is tested under different institutional hypotheses. Contrary to expectations, it is not found to be influenced by divided government, but it is heavily influenced by incumbency, meaning in practice whether a popularly elected president is running. Moreover, this incumbency variable highly conditions the time horizon of national economic voting. When a popularly elected president is not running, such voting is almost entirely prospective. These conditional effects go a long way toward explaining certain enduring controversies in the literature. National economic conditions regularly influence outcomes in U.S. presidential elections. Voluminous research has secured certain propositions about this link between economics and elections. In aggregate-level time series models, a macroeconomic indicator has an almost obligatory presence as a central variable (

This article looks at the economic models of voting and the most studied cases of economic voting. It shows how the studies presented in the article were selected. The next section then identifies the most studied cases in the United States, Great Britain, and France. After discussing single-country studies, the article then turns to studies that examine multiple countries.