Economy or austerity? Drivers of retrospective voting before and during the Great Recession

Abstract

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.

Economic voting goes local: evidence from the Italian regions

“…This helps us in detecting the evidence of some benchmarking effect at the regional level, i.e. ‘the possibility that citizens compare the local [regional] performance to the corresponding national average, or to some past situation before the crisis period’ (Giuliani, 2022 a : 81). Overall, the estimated coefficients of the interaction terms confirm our previous findings, especially the existence of a pattern of economic voting at the regional level, but at the same time, reveal the presence a moderating effect exerted by the state of the economy at the national level.…”

“…Although the decentralization of the Italian political system started several decades ago, the literature on regional economic voting is virtually absent. Some studies have investigated the impact of some regional macroeconomic variables at the national level (Giuliani, 2018(Giuliani, , 2022a, while others have focused exclusively on economic voting at the national level, both in relation to the dependent variable and the independent variables (Bellucci, 1991(Bellucci, , 2003Lewis-Beck and Nadeau, 2012). To our knowledge, no study has yet focused on economic voting at regional elections.…”

Absolute and Benchmarked Economic Voting. A Subnational Perspective on a Decade of Elections in Southern Europe

“…Secondly, its empirical test is intrinsically conservative, given the abundance of potentially confounding elements, and the range of economic quantities potentially triggering the electoral outcome. Thirdly, it allows multiple sophisticated cross-country and longitudinal research designs, thus enabling better investigation of macrolevel conditional factors such as different institutional set-ups (Dassonneville & Lewis-Beck 2017;Powell & Whitten 1993), levels and types of globalization (Giuliani 2019;Hellwig 2015), and policy constraints (Giuliani 2022a;Hernandez & Kriesi 2016).…”

Voting between two global crises. A NUTS3-level analysis of retrospective voting in four South-European countries

“… 2 That does not mean that voters may hold different opinions regarding economic policies, patrimonies, or inequality. The positional and valence characteristics of these different issues have been increasingly addressed by scholars (Lewis-Beck and Nadeau, 2011; Dassonneville and Lewis-Beck, 2013, 2020; Talving, 2017; Giuliani, 2022a; Quinlan and Okolikj, 2020), but their discussion falls outside the scope of this article.…”