The Economic Vote: How Political and Economy Institutions Condition Election Results. By Raymond M. Duch and Randolph T. Stevenson. (Cambridge University Press, 2008.)

2009 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 756-757
Author(s):  
Lynn Vavrick
2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-190
Author(s):  
Francesco Giovanni Truglia ◽  
Alessandro Zeli

AbstractThe 2014 European Parliament election and the 2016 Constitutional Referendum in Italy occurred in the middle of two general elections. These votes, taking place respectively at the beginning and the end of the government led by Matteo Renzi of the Democratic Party (PD), represented a public test of the PD leadership. The election results were diverse in many respects, but they replicate social, economic, political, and cultural differences. In particular, between the two electoral exercises the differential electoral behaviour of South compared with the rest of the country is deepened. Moreover, the results can be interpreted as the outcome of differences in age, educational levels, social, and economic unrest; all these variables are synthesized by the territorial distribution of the vote and this helps in interpreting the evolution of political sentiment in Italy. A spatial statistics methodology is utilized to analyse votes by means of their territorial distributions. The outcomes indicate that referendum result was influenced by the economic vote. Apart from the substance of the constitutional reform, the referendum result can be traced back to economic factors: the absence of perceived economic improvements and the persistence of high unemployment.


2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 263-265
Author(s):  
Dmitri Mitin

Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, 1990–1999, Joshua A. Tucker, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. xxii, 417.Recognizing and predicting the patterns of voting behaviour is a formidable task even in the case of mature and stable democracies. Needless to say, the identification of such trends in the wake of a fundamental political and economic restructuring, when the basic rules of the game are still in flux, can be frustratingly elusive. In this ambitious and methodologically sophisticated study, Joshua Tucker takes on the challenge and suggests a fresh approach for cutting through the fog of post-communist institutional ambiguity. The book reports on several prominent regularities in the voting outcomes that span five countries, several distinct institutional designs, twenty national elections and ten years of transition. In contrast to the studies that rely on micro-level survey data or small-n cross-country comparisons, Tucker aggregates and analyzes the election results at the intermediate, regional level. Cross-regional comparison provides enough resolution for detecting systematic voting patterns shaped by local economic conditions. Explaining the observed connection between regional economy and regional vote is the central theme of Tucker's study.


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