Electoral Shocks PDF Download

"This dissertation analyzes the political and electoral consequences of economic shocks. The key premise of my work is that the economy is susceptible to shocks that have distributional consequences, generating winners and losers and thus political effects. Economic shocks have been found to impact incumbent support, support for populist parties, and electoral participation. They have also been associated with increased political polarization, the transformation of political and party systems, and a backlash against globalization. Despite these findings, the overall conclusion of the literature is that the effect of economic shocks on voting behavior is unclear, and its manifestations are not well understood. My three-paper dissertation investigates the electoral effects of what I term sociotropic economic shocks. I conceive of these shocks (e.g., plant closures or business expansions) as geographically concentrated restructuring events covered by the media and involving a significant number of jobs. I argue that the study of sociotropic economic shocks offers more analytic leverage than an exclusive focus on personal economic shocks, such as job loss or loss of income. My doctoral research highlights three key findings. First, using data on localized shocks and subnational election results for 27 EU countries for the past 20 years, I find that neither negative nor positive shocks impact incumbent support in legislative and European elections. Survey experiments conducted in Romania reveal why this is the case: voters attribute responsibility for these events to a non-political actor (the firm behind the restructuring) rather than to the national government or the European Union. Second, in a paper co-authored with my colleague Aengus Bridgman, we discover that the electoral efficacy of financially compensating those impacted by negative shocks through the EU's European Globalization Adjustment Fund is context dependent: for 20 EU countries, the intervention helps the incumbents, boosts turnout, and decreases populist support only in European elections and when it takes place in the pre-election year. Third, based on a natural experiment, I find that austerity decreases incumbent support, but the effect is gradual rather than immediate, and is associated with increasing media coverage of the austerity measures. Together, these three studies help bring more clarity to the effect of economic shocks on voting behavior. They make a number of significant theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions to the field, including: 1) theorizing sociotropic economic shocks and highlighting the role of attributions of responsibility in limiting their effect on support for the incumbent; 2) testing whether compensating the losers of economic transformations pays off electorally; and 3) showing that while austerity measures negatively impact incumbent support, the erosion is gradual, driven by media coverage of the measures and the defection and demobilization of past incumbent supporters"--