Abstract
This paper investigates the occurrence and patterns of economic voting in the 2006 election for the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic. I construct multinomial logit models which specify the log odds of electoral support for a given political party as function of the regional economic conditions faced by the voter, controlling for political and socioeconomic factors, and estimate these with opinion-survey data. The results provide evidence of unemployment-based economic voting: other things equal, a 1 percentage point rise in the unemployment rate in the voter’s region increases their probability of voting for the leading incumbent socialist party on average by 0.8 percentage points and decreases their probability of voting for the Green party by 0.5 percentage points. Interestingly, these effects are driven by affluent voters. I conclude that the observed pattern of economic voting is most accurately described by the luxury goods voting model and, to some extent, the clientele hypothesis.
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Notes
- 1.
Models of economic voting may be based on objective economic indicators or subjective perceptions. The former have the advantage of being exogenous and the latter of affecting government popularity without any lags (Kayser and Grafström 2016).
- 2.
Inflation, too, is commonly found as an explanatory variable in models of economic voting. Unfortunately, regional inflation indicators are unavailable.
- 3.
- 4.
Standard errors are heteroscedasticity consistent. Diagnostic tests show that the effects of goveval, left, right, and age are statistically significant at 1 percentage in determining vote choice among different political parties, while the effects of U and livstd are significant at 5 percentage. The remaining variables (GDP, educ2/educ3, econact, married, and sex) are insignificant at conventional levels. A Wald test for combining alternatives indicates that the outcomes (political parties) are distinguishable and should not be combined, while tests for the independence of irrelevant alternatives produce mixed results. The model McFadden R2 is 0.381.
- 5.
Paldam and Nannestad (2000) find that unemployment is the one macroeconomic quantity voters are best informed about.
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Acknowledgments
The article is processed as an output of the research project “Public finance in the Czech Republic and the EU” registered by the Internal Grant Agency of University of Economics, Prague, under the registration number F1/1/2016. The author thanks Jan Zouhar and Jan Pavel for their advice and helpful comments.
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Tomankova, I. (2018). Economic Voting in the 2006 Czech General Election. In: Procházka, D. (eds) The Impact of Globalization on International Finance and Accounting. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68762-9_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68762-9_26
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