Who Reacts? Performance Voting and Individual Heterogeneity

A large body of work finds evidence in support of the ‘performance voting’ model demonstrating that a strong relationship exists between economic performance and incumbent support. There are two main shortcomings with this literature. First, the literature focuses on voters’ reactions to economic performance of governments but from a theoretical point of view, retrospective voting does not solely have to involve evaluations of the performance of incumbent parties. Second, most studies treat voters’ reactions to economic performance of governments as rather uniform however, several works uncovered extensive individual heterogeneity in attitude formation and political behaviour. This paper, first, extends the scope of investigation beyond the incumbent party to past performance of any previously endorsed party; second, it uncovers individual level sources of variation in performance voting due to political sophistication and personality traits. To conduct this study we focus on Germany using a long-term panel study.