The context of economic voting: an introduction

In its ideal form, the theory of economic voting is a special case of the rational-choice perspective on electoral behavior. Economic voting enables the electorate to maximize individual utility or welfare. Officeseeking politicians offer policy packages that maximize their likelihood of winning elections and thereby obtaining a role in government. So far, the only restrictive or "empirical" assumption is that economic policy dominates the utility functions of – at least a sufficiently large part of – the electorate. Much of the early research on economic voting demonstrated the validity of this "empirical" assumption, i.e. that economic policy, or at least economic performance, had enough salience among the electorate to significantly influence election outcomes. The explosive growth of the economic-voting literature, though, has largely been due to the emergence of numerous controversies surrounding the nature of the economic-voting calculus. Exactly which economic policies matter most to voters? Is the electorate generally concerned about personal financial circumstances or about national economic conditions? Does the salience of economic policy vary in meaningful ways across groups of voters, electoral contexts, and political systems?