Group Economic Voting: A comparison of the Netherlands and Germany

It has become widely accepted that economics matters for voting. However, the consensus hides a considerable amount of confusion and disagreement about basic issues in the relationship between economic variables and the calculus of political support. The lines in the debate have been drawn already for a long time and are well known. Are aggregate "objective" economic data preferable to individual perceptions of the state of the economy? Is the vote choice based on experience or on expectations of future economic performance? Do voters carefully evaluate the contribution of government policy to national or personal welfare, or is economic voting a knee-jerk reaction to changing economic times? Clearly, the answers given to these questions are not independent. At the same time, we may need to recognize that economic voting may vary from country to country, from person to person, and even over time (Lin, 1999). In this chapter, we pay special attention to the political and personal contexts of the economic voter. For one, we examine how coalition governments may aid economic voting in multi-party systems. Further, we account for voter heterogeneity based on the salience of economic issues to groups. We argue that economic subgroups present a more appropriate level of analysis than either the personal or collective level. The model of conditional responsibility is evaluated using longitudinal data for Germany and the Netherlands.