Punishing without rewards? A comprehensive examination of the asymmetry in economic voting

Abstract

It has been controversial whether incumbents are punished more for a bad economy than they are rewarded for a good economy due to mixed results from previous studies on one or handful number of countries. This paper makes an empirical contribution to this lingering question by conducting extensive tests on whether this asymmetry hypothesis is a cross-nationally generalizable phenomenon using all currently available modules of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems survey from 122 elections in 42 representative democracies between 1996 and 2016, as well as macro-economic indicators and individual-level economic perception. In general, this paper finds little support for the asymmetry hypothesis; although the evidence of such asymmetric economic voting is found in some subpopulations using certain economic indicators, these conditional effects are largely inconsistent, suggesting that it is still safe to assume a linear relationship between economic conditions and support for the incumbent.

Retrospective voting in Central and Eastern Europe: Hyper-accountability, corruption or socio-economic inequality?

“…However, it still means that voters punish the incumbents both in bad and in good times. These findings on the post-communist region are somewhat at odds with the recent research on economic voting (Park, 2018), which finds (by combining macroeconomic indicators and individual-level economic perceptions) little support for the asymmetry hypothesis (that incumbents are punished more in bad times than are rewarded in good times). In the post-communist region, asymmetry is permanent: almost every government in CEE is doomed to lose.…”

The rightward shift and electoral decline of social democratic parties under increasing inequality

“…As the dependent variable is dichotomous, logistic mixed-effects models are estimated, which include both fixed and random effects. Since the number of elections per country or year are too small in the CSES to identify election-level variance within a country or year, it is unsuitable to include random effects for both levels (Bryan and Jenkins 2016;Park 2019). Hence, since the hypotheses primarily rely on changes over time, observations are clustered at the year-level to isolate the potential effects of time-specific factors on voting, with country fixed effects.…”

Collective Decision-Making and the Economic Vote

“…The results from these vignette experiments confirm that subjects, particularly in Ireland, but also, to a lesser extent, The Netherlands, respond to these signals in a way consistent with our overall argument. A caveat that possibly speaks to the ongoing debate regarding asymmetric economic voting (Park, 2019) is that we only find large treatment effects for the vignette scenarios in which the economy is doing poorly.…”