Unemployment and Economic Voting in Greece: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

The state of the economy has been traditionally considered as an important determinant of political behaviour. The theory of economic voting has established a link between citizens' retrospective evaluations about the state of the national economy and their voting intentions. In Greece, much like elsewhere, the frequency of electoral events, the advent of coalition and caretaker governments, and the overreaching consensus about the bad state of the economy, have made it difficult to explain voting behaviour using the classic questions of retrospective sociotropic evaluations. Following some recent work on the subject (Dassonneville and Lewis-Beck 2013), we present an alternative way of investigating the impact of the economy on individual voting behaviour by focusing on the issue of unemployment. To do so, we conducted a randomized survey experiment where respondents were given different scenarios about the future level of unemployment. We therefore framed the issue prospectively, and further to that we considered the impact of economic evaluations to be conditional to the respondents’ personal economic situation. This way, we were able to assess the electoral implications of the economy by moving from a retrospective sociotropic to a prospective egocentric framework.