Economy and elections: A comparative analysis of politico-economic interaction in Western democracies

Aggregate-level analyses of the relationship between macroeconomic performance and electoral support for incumbents have suffered from lack of comparable support for the incumbency-oriented economic voting hypothesis across nations. The literature persistently ignored the political context of elections that shape the ease of responsibility attribution to the incumbent governments. The main contention in this dissertation is that political context of an election, such as the duration and the coalition size of the incumbent and the degree of its control over the legislature, shapes the character of the relationship between the economy and the incumbent's electoral success. Different political contexts are thus systematically incorporated into the analysis. Those incumbents which enjoy a certain ambiguity of responsibility are found to be unevenly vulnerable in the face of similar economic conditions as their counterparts who will be held responsible for prevailing economic conditions. When the long-run political context of elections are explicitly taken into account cross-country differences in economic condition effects disappear. However, the significance of some of the commonly used economic variables are questioned and the need for further analysis of economic voting relationship across different political contexts is asserted.;Many previous analyses of aggregate-level policy-oriented economic voting hypothesis have been based on expert judgements of incumbents' ideology. These judgements first of all concentrate on long term characteristics of ideological stands and, more importantly, do not reflect parties' positions on economic issues per se. Using parties' arguments on economic issues in their election manifestoes, this article develops a left-right ideology dimension that reflects parties' relative positions on economic issues for 163 elections in 16 countries in the post-World War II period. The analysis suggests that over time there are very stable differences in parties' ideological positions on economic issues. Despite apparent maturation and thus increasing clarity of ideological cleavages on economic issues, and persistent evidence of diverging economic policy outcomes in the literature, no distinct reward and punishment by the electorate is observed according to the ideological stands of the incumbents. Accordingly, the policy-oriented economic voting hypothesis is rejected and possible reasons for this phenomenon is discussed.