While it makes sense to expect voters to react to recent changes in economic circumstances, it seems reasonable as well to assume that voters also take into account the issue-handling capabilities of the different political parties that are competing for their votes. The parties’ reputation as competent political actors are an important component of the valence model of political choice, and a growing body of work has started to examine the impact on vote choice of perceptions of party competence at managing the economy. In this paper, we integrate these two valence dimensions of economic voting into a single incumbent vote model. We do so with the use of individual-level survey data from five Canadian Election Studies conducted between 1984 and 2011. That relatively long period of time allows us to estimate the impact of economic assessments and issue ownership perceptions on the vote during good and bad economic times.
