Economic Voting in Portuguese Municipal Elections

Abstract

" "E Ec co on no om mi ic c V Vo ot ti in ng g i in n P Po or rt tu ug gu ue es se e M Mu un ni ic ci ip pa al l E El le ec ct ti io on ns s" " R Ro od dr ri ig go o M Ma ar rt ti in ns s F Fr ra an nc ci is sc co o J Jo os sé é V Ve ei ig ga a NIPE WP 33/ 2010 " "E Ec co on no om mi ic c V Vo ot ti in ng g i in n P Po or rt tu ug gu ue es se e M Mu un ni ic ci ip pa al l E El le ec ct ti io on ns s" " R Ro od dr ri ig go o M Ma ar rt ti in ns s F Fr ra an nc ci is sc co o J Jo os sé é V Ve ei ig ga a N NI IP PE E *

Economic voting in Brazilian presidential elections: evidence with panel data from municipalities in São Paulo

“…Even though they had used individual level data, they found that local economic prosperity play a greater role in vote choice than both the improvement in the individuals' own economic well-being as well as the perception of changes in national economic prosperity. Martins and Veiga (2013) find a positive relation between the effects of national and local economic performance on the percentage of votes obtained by the party of the incumbent mayor in Portugal. Oliver and Ha (2007), using survey data of over 1,400 voters in 30 different US suburban communities concluded that better local economic conditions or local government performance is positively related with incumbent support.…”

“…In sum, to the best of our knowledge, there are almost no studies that test the effect of the municipal economic performance on national elections. The only exceptions are the studies made by Pattie and Johnston (2001), Martins and Veiga (2013), Oliver and Ha (2007), and Elinder (2010). Pattie and Johnston (2001) showed the importance of the local economy in understanding voters' electoral behavior in the general elections of 1997 in the United Kingdom.…”

Learning the Economic Vote at Local Elections: Case of Lithuania, 1995-2011

“…Rodrigo Martins and Francisco Jose Veiga (2010) provide different evidence: in Portuguese local elections, unemployment has a negative impact on the election performance of incumbents. This effect is more strongly manifested in regions where the local government includes political parties that also govern at the national level (Martins and Veiga, 2010). Therefore, it appears that local governments, in reality, could be held responsible for unemployment trends.…”

Punishing local incumbents for the local economy: economic voting in the 2012 Belgian municipal elections

“…A first strand of research follows the second-order election theory (Reif and Schmitt, 1980) and considers local elections as referenda for national-level politics. It is this line of research that shows that voters react to national economic conditions and credit or blame parties in national office through local or subnational ballots (Jérôme and Lewis-Beck, 1999; Gélineau and Bélanger, 2005; Jérôme and Jérôme-Speziari, 2005; Auberger and Dubois, 2011; Fauvelle-Aymar and Lewis-Beck, 2011; Martins and Veiga, 2013). A second group of scholars argues that local economic conditions affect voting behaviour in national electoral contexts (Johnston et al ., 2000; Johnston and Pattie, 2001; Cutler, 2002).…”

“…The limited number of studies that sheds light on how local economic conditions affect voting in local elections, furthermore, is mostly focussing on the aggregate level i.e. investigating shifts in the incumbent's vote share (Boyne et al 2009;Martins and Veiga 2013;Sakurai and Menezes-Filho 2008). While insightful, such an approach is also subject to ecological fallacy, which is why these findings have to be complemented with insights from individual-level studies (Oliver and Ha 2007).…”