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While economic policy issues feature prominently in nearly all German election campaigns, the study of economic voting is not as developed in Germany as it is in other major democracies, such as the United States, Britain and France (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000). A few early empirical studies of German elections point to the importance of the economy for electoral outcomes and government popularity (Fröchling 1998; Feld and Kirchgässner 2000; Rattinger and Faas 2001), but scholars have recently begun devoting more attention to these relationships (Faas 2010; Rattinger and Steinbrecher 2011; Steinbrecher and Steiner 2011; Zohlnhöfer 2011; Anderson and Hecht 2012). One possible reason for the paucity of research in the past is that economic voting may be difficult to detect in Germany due to its parliamentary system and coalition governments. The typical way to study reward-punishment economic voting is to test whether voters support the government when times are good and punish it when times are bad. This approach works well with single-party governments, but what happens in coalition governments? Do voters reward or punish the entire coalition government, or do they target the party they deem most responsible for leading the economy?
In this article, we address this question by combining theories of voting behavior with theoretical approaches to coalition governance and cabinet decision making, while also taking policy-specific considerations into account. We advance two key arguments. First, economic voting should be conceptualized in a distinctive fashion when dealing with multiparty cabinets. Secondly, once we use this modified conceptualization, we should observe economic voting even in polities governed by multiparty coalitions. Our assumption is that voters are able to cognitively cope with the fact that several parties are responsible for adopting and implementing policies. In this regard, we expect voters to hold accountable the party that is leading the government or is in charge of the key cabinet offices responsible for economic and financial policy issues. We assess whether voters target parties based on their cabinet responsibilities or whether they reward the coalition government as a whole for positive economic performance.
We expect that the effects of economic voting remain significant for either the "ministerial discretion model" (Laver and Shepsle 1996), the model that reflects "prime ministerial government" or the one that...