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Theories of economic voting have a long tradition in political science and continue to inspire a large group of scholars. Classical economic voting theory assumes a reward-and-punishment mechanism (Key, 1966). This mechanism implies that incumbents are more likely to stay in power under a good economy, but are cast out under a bad economy (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000). The economy has repeatedly been shown to be a major determinant of electoral behavior (see especially the recent book by Duch and Stevenson, 2008), but the current economic crisis seems to provide a marked illustration of how the economy affects voting. In recent elections across the Western industrialized world, most ruling coalitions lost their majority. Opposition parties, on the other hand, whether right wing or left wing, have appeared to benefit from the economic downturn.
The clear pattern of voters punishing their government during the current economic crisis does raise the question whether the impact of the economy on vote choices has increased over the past decades. The observed weakening of party identification across established democracies does provide a possible explanation for the economy to have become a more important vote choice predictor (Kayser and Wlezien, 2011). Concurrently with a decrease of partisanship, however, processes of globalization and Europeanization have been taken place. These evolutions can be argued to have decreased the clarity of responsibility for managing the economy; therefore, it has become less clear for voters whom to credit or blame for economic performance. The process of globalization, in itself, could have caused the economic vote to become less important at a national level (Hellwig, 2001).
The current economic crisis, then, is taking place in a context of decreased partisanship on the one hand and increased globalization on the other. As such, the crisis provides clear challenges for economic voting theories. Research work relating the economic crisis to elections has tended to focus on the countries hardest hit, such as those of southern Europe (see, for example, the collection of papers...