Economic Voting in Europe: Did the Crisis Matter?

Recently, academic literature has been concerned with the consequences of economic crisis: in the changing environment, do classic voting behaviour models still hold? This paper explores what happened to economic voting in times of crisis. Economic hardship in Europe would lead us to expect a strong negative economic vote. Yet, recent academic work suggests that globalization, economic openness and interdependence may make it increasingly hard for voters to assign responsibility. Has the economic effect then weakened? Using European Election Studies from 1989, 1994, 2004 and 2009 for 10 European countries (N˃40,000), I demonstrate that the economic effect is remarkably stable over the two decades. This is not to conclude that in terms of economic accountability the crisis did not matter. The proportion of unhappy citizens nearly doubled and incumbents were still punished but the strength of the relationship between incumbent support and economic assessments remained the same.