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

Abstract

Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain went several times to the polls during the 2010–2019 decade. It was a period characterised by the strenuous effort to recover the economic situation before the onset of the Great Recession; an effort, however, often constrained by externally imposed austerity policies, and by a refugee crisis that contributed to the growing salience of the immigration issue. The article adopts an original sub-national approach to examine if and how the economic situation and the incidence of immigration affected the electoral outcomes in the four South-European countries. Adopting a theory of retrospective behaviour, the research reported in the article confirms the association between employment and immigration levels, on the one hand, and punishment of the incumbent government on the other. However, the electoral effects of immigration are conditioned by the partisan composition of the government and, under centre-right cabinets, are aggravated by a negative economic conjuncture.

Economic voting goes local: evidence from the Italian regions

“…In our study, the concept of ‘economic improvement’ (or deterioration) has been operationalized by considering the unemployment rate. This choice is mainly due to two reasons: first, unemployment is the main – or one of the most important – concerns of Italian citizens; 2 second, (un)employment is widely and commonly used in the literature on economic voting, representing in many analyses the main predictor of voting behavior (Dassonneville and Lewis-Beck, 2013; Giuliani, 2022 b ).…”