Economic shocks occur regularly across European democracies. Despite the prevalence and electoral relevance of such shocks, the overall results on their impact on voting behavior have been inconclusive. I test this conclusion with a new dataset of sub-national (NUTS-2 level) European and legislative elections results and labor market shocks for 27 European democracies for the 2003 – 2020 period. The panel data estimations confirm the mixed findings, irrespective of type of shock (e.g. positive vs. negative) and outcome (incumbent support vs. change in the incumbent support).

I posit that attribution of responsibility could explain the mixed findings. I argue that attribution of political responsibility for sociotropic shocks (e.g. plant closure) is contingent on contextual factors (the type of restructuring event; the affected industry; the number of impacted workers; the sex of workers; the institutional set-up) and individual predispositions (personal job insecurity, nationalism, partisanship).

As Central and Eastern Europe is a fertile ground for offshoring and automation, I focus on the Romanian case, for which economic shocks also have an ambiguous effect on incumbent support. The key test involves a conjoint experiment conducted on a sample recruited through Facebook. I expose voters to hypothetical scenarios triggered by negative restructuring events (e.g. offshoring, automation) and ask them to evaluate the effect of the scenarios on political attribution and voting behavior. I also analyze positive shocks (e.g. job creation due to technological progress). To validate my conjoint analysis, I employ a vignette experiment both in the Facebook survey and a nationally representative sample.