The economic voting theory sustains that voters can make governments accountable by assessing the incumbents’ economic performance as the dominant criteria casting a vote. Most research have used macro-level data to assess electoral volatility at the aggregate level, whereas micro-level research focus on respondents’ perception of the economy to assess their vote decision. Debates have oriented to the endogeneity issues of perception behind economic evaluation and to the effect of political context.
While dominant research assumes the economy is a valence issue to which all citizens should react in the same manner, my argument is different. I propose that there is no single economy and there is no single economic voter. By decomposing the elements that compose the economic performance, I identify how different groups of citizens react to change and its effects over stability in support to the incumbent. The article uses survey data collected between 2008 and 2018 across eighteen democracies and aggregate indicators of economic performance at the subnational level.
This presentation contributes to the literature in three aspects. Firstly, it acknowledges that there is no single type and informality, inequalities and gender are relevant drivers to the economic experience. Secondly, it disentangles how different voters perceive competing dimensions of the economic cycles. Thirdly, it considers the effect of political context on the economic experience as it compares across macro and micro-level.