Employment Insecurity, Incumbent Partisanship, and Voting Behavior in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

We argue that occupational unemployment rates, by informing perceptions of economic insecurity, serve as a salient and powerful heuristic for aggregate economic performance. Consequently, high and rising occupational unemployment leads to negative evaluations of the economy and reduces the probability of supporting the incumbent government. Simultaneously, however, such changes shift support toward left-wing parties. Thus, economic insecurity serves as a valence issue, but is also inherently a positional issue, due to the distributional consequences of welfare policies. This brings about a potential conflict as under left-wing incumbent governments the economically insecure are cross-pressured, which increases their likelihood of exiting the electoral arena completely. We test our hypotheses using a Bayesian hierarchical multinomial model, with individual-level data from 43 elections in 21 countries. We find support for the hypothesized effects of employment insecurity on voting behavior, with a follow-up analysis supporting the posited informational mechanism.