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Introduction
The literature on economic voting has grown exponentially in the last few years.
Although there are numerous studies that have attempted to establish a relationship
between economic and electoral outcomes, contradictory results in comparative economic
voting studies have led scholars to believe that the vote function is unstable (Nannestad
and Paldam 1994; Lewis-Beck and Paldam 2000). Concerns regarding whether voters’
motivations are egotropic or sociotropic, or whether voters are prospective or
retrospective still remain. Although case studies and survey research have been
successful in finding an economic vote function (Kramer 1971; Fiorina 1981; Lewis-
Beck 1988), cross- national analyses have failed to find a robust link between electoral
and economic outcomes. Some scholars argue that this result is due to the fact that given
the complex institutions of the political systems voters simply do not use their vote to
punish bad economic performance, i.e., there is no vote function (Cheibub and
Przeworski 1999). Others contend that we will only observe economic voting if we
control for institutional variables and for the clarity of responsibility context (Powell and
Whitten 1993; Palmer and Whitten 1999; Anderson 2000; Stokes 2001).
While the debate in the comparative economic voting literature has mainly
centered on which institutional variables to add to the vote function, few cross- national
analyses have focused on: a) how voters evaluate economic performance, i.e., whether
the standard specifications of the economic variables are correct; and, b) whom do voters
punish for a bad economic performance, i.e. whether the left hand side of the vote
function is correctly specified. This paper will concern itself with these two issues.
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The idea of considering voters as more rational and sophisticated when voting is not new. Two examples
of previous studies that are concerned with how voters judge the economy and with their length of vision
Convention