ABSTRACT
The central importance of relationships among economy, polity and society to the wealth of nations and the well-being of people has attracted much interest among academic researchers and non-academic observers for many years. A major model of economic voting is the reward-punishment model. According to this model, people who evaluate economic conditions as getting better vote for, thereby "rewarding", a governing party or leader. Although the reward-punishment model is straightforward and has attracted much attention among academic researchers and non-academic observers, its coronation as the superior explanation of economic voting remains premature. In economic-voting research, the principal dependent variables are vote intentions and vote choices. Since the revival of political-economy research in the early 1970s, the economic-voting field has witnessed substantial progress as well as enduring controversies. Some scholars initially attracted to the field by the "promise of parsimony" discovered the field to be more difficult than originally thought.
