Economic voting and the Great Recession in Europe: a comparative study of twenty-five countries

Abstract

The Great Recession of 2007--09 was the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The effects were felt across most of the developed world and Europe was no exception. In many European countries, austerity programmes were implemented in response to the recession, which were often deeply unpopular. Many governments lost power in the years following the recession, with sometimes strikingly harsh swings against them. One notable example was the Irish election of 2011, in which the incumbent Fianna Fáil was reduced from 71 to 20 seats, by far its worst result at any general election since independence in 1922. This is congruent with the theory of economic voting, according to which voters will remove from office governments that fail to deliver economic prosperity. Although there is an enormous empirical literature supporting this theory, almost all of this evidence pertains to the typical boom and bust cycle of individual countries and little is known about economic voting during a severe global recession. The Irish result could have been indicative of the usual economic vote, a bolstered economic vote due to the unusual scale and severity of the crisis, or of dissatisfaction with the government's handling of the crisis. This thesis investigates whether the usual economic vote in European countries was altered during the Great Recession.

This thesis uses survey data from the 2004, 2009 and 2014 waves of the European Election Studies~(EES) to compare the economic vote in 25 European countries before, during and after the Great Recession. Multilevel methods are used to model voters' support for the parties they could vote for at general elections in their own countries. Using this method, the results show that the economic vote was weaker during the crisis than it was either before or after. In order to explain these results, I analyse which parties voters tended to prefer after the crisis and how attitudes towards the European Union evolved over time. The results find that there was a shift away from centrist and pro-European parties towards radical and Eurosceptic parties following the crisis. In addition, support for the EU fell over the same time period and voters were increasingly likely to hold the EU responsible for economic conditions. Given the timing of these shifts as well as the association between European institutions and austerity policies, these findings suggest that the austerity programmes implemented in the wake of the crisis may have been a stronger catalyst for economic voting in Europe than the Great Recession itself. Show more