Local economic voting, perception and voters’ attitude: Evidence from Hungarian survey and local economic data

What is the effect of local economic conditions on voters’ perception on the economy and in turn on voters’ party preferences? Beyond economic voting, to what extent does voters’ attitude towards salient issues, such as migration and sovereignty, determine their party preferences? Focusing on Hungarian voters, we rely on an extremely granular data, on repeated cross-sectional individual surveys with nearly 110 000 face-to-face individual level interviews between 2006 and 2018. This dataset is merged with national and local economic measures between 2006 and 2015 to predict the exogenous variation in individuals’ economic perception measures. Our results show that (1) survey data alone systematically overestimate the effect of individuals’ economic perception on party preferences; (2) individuals’ perception on the national economy is driven by local economic measures; (3) the effect of individuals’ economic perception on party preferences is robust over time, while attitudes towards salient issues are activated only occasionally.