Economic voting in subnational government

In the late 1960s, it became a common journalistic assumption that economic factors play an important role in determining government popularity. In March 1968, Harold Wilson asserted that “all political history shows that the standing of the government depends on the success of its economic policy” (Heath et al., 1991, p. 159). The notion of some kind of link between economic conditions and government support is firmly established within the scientific community, and the literature dealing with it has grown considerably. ¹ Most popularity functions assume the classical “reward–punishment” model of the type suggested by Key (1968). It is simple: if economic conditions are good, so the most common argument goes, the electorate will reward incumbents, while it will punish them if economic conditions are less than satisfactory. The implicit assumption behind this statement is that the government is directly responsible for economic conditions. Butler and Stokes argued that government responsibility for the economy is a fundamental assumption in the dialogue between parties and the electorate.

Modern electorates tend to solve [the] problem of causal reasoning by assuming that certain causal relationships must exist rather than by discerning what they are. Electors focus their attention primarily on certain conditions, which they value positively or negatively and simply assume that past or future governments affect them. The public can call for a government's dismissal in economic hard times just as it calls for a team manager's dismissal in a losing season, in each case concluding that causal relationships must exist without knowing in detail what they are (Butler and Stokes, 1976: 25).