Housing and Vote for the Incumbent: A Reassessment of the Economic Vote

• In Event: Research in Five (Graduate Students) Session II

Abstract

Economic voting is one of the most effective mechanisms for explaining electoral choices. While the stability of the mechanism in most established democracies gives economic voting a certain credibility, researchers have recently begun to challenge the association between economic performance and the vote share for the incumbent. This paper is in line with this approach and studies the moderating effect of the local environment on perceptions of the economy. More specifically, I argue that traditional sociotropic and egotropic assessments of the economy are both shaped by local considerations with heterogeneous effects according to the personal situation of each individual. Instead of traditional measures such as GDP, unemployment rate or income, I take into account the cost of housing as a measure. This measure has several advantages: it touches the entire electorate, it is a concrete indicator that does not require high levels of sophistication and it should be less sensitive to the impact of political attitudes such as partisanship. To validate my theory, I proceed in two ways. First, to demonstrate the association between the cost of housing and voting behaviour, I use the LISS panel of 5000 households in the Netherlands that includes measures of the share of the household expenditure devoted to housing. Second, to establish a possible causal mechanism, I use the sudden interruption of rent-control polices in Massachusetts, specifically in Cambridge in 1995. The objective of the paper is to provide evidence that the economic vote might be underestimated.

Author

• Alexandra Jabbour, University of Montreal