ABSTRACT
If one would meet a group of economic voters, what would they look like? If we are to go along with either common political wisdom, or most scholars working on economic voting, they should look pretty much like normal people, more or less a random selection of society. The point here is not so much that economic conditions determine for a lot of people what parties they are going to support. Rather, the model of the “economic voter” claims to be less of a theoretical abstraction than its rational choice cousins “economic” or “political (wo)man”. At the same time, the economic voter still exhibits a lot of the defining characteristics of a rational choice actor. To quote Lewis-Beck (1988: 33–34): “Voters are not blind subjects of sociological forces. Nor are they tabulae rasae, waiting to be filled with campaign promises. Rather, voters weigh how things have been and act accordingly.” Economic voting is an instrumental act.
