Elsevier

Electoral Studies

Volume 31, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 5-19
Electoral Studies

Voting when the economy goes bad, everyone is in charge, and no one is to blame: The case of the 2009 German election

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2011.06.003Get rights and content

Abstract

The economy was a major issue in Germany’s 2009 election. The global economic crisis did not spare Germany, whose economy is tightly integrated into the global economy. So when the German economy experienced a historical shock, did voters connect their views of the economy with their vote choice? Or did they, as some research has suggested, recognize Germany’s dependence on global markets and cut the government slack, especially when the government consists of the country’s two major parties? Using pre- and post-election panel surveys from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we investigate the weight that voters gave to the economy, relative to other considerations, when casting their ballot and whether governing parties were disproportionately judged based on the state of the economy.

Highlights

► Examines the effects of economic evaluations on vote choice in the 2009 German election. ► Uses surveys collected before and after 2009 election. ► Analysis finds that voters did not blame the government for the nation's economic downturn. ► Voters who personally had suffered during the crisis deserted the governing parties in almost equal measure and threw their support to smaller opposition parties.

Section snippets

The economy and economic opinions in 2009

Students of elections have long been interested in the connection between the economy and the behavior of voters, with the basic model positing a relationship running from economic conditions to voter choice. Frequently unstated, this model assumes a causal chain that connects the real economy and voter behavior by way of voters’ opinions about the state of the economy and attributions of who is responsible for it (Anderson, 2007). Importantly, this implies that economic opinions reflect

The 2009 election and theories of economic voting

The critical step of connecting economic opinions with voter choices requires examining their impact at the level of individual voters. This requires an explanation of how German voters may have reasoned about the state of the economy, who – if anyone – was culpable for its state, and how these considerations prompted them to go to the polls in the first place and cast their ballot for one of the 5 major parties contesting the election. As it turns out, such an explanation is difficult to come

Economic evaluations and vote choice: analysis

An initial analysis suggests that our intuition has some support in the data. Table 1 reports bivariate correlations between evaluations of government and party performance with evaluations of economic conditions. As the table shows, economic evaluations correlate positively with our measures of government and party performance (suggesting that more optimistic economic evaluations are positively related to favorable evaluations of government performance), but these correlations are quite weak.

The influence of economic evaluations on voting against the government

As a first look at possible economic voting effects, we examined the impact of economic evaluations on voting for the governing parties (1) (or not, 0) with the help of a logistic regression. Recall that a high value on the economic questions imply more positive evaluations; a positive coefficient therefore indicates that respondents with more positive evaluations were more likely to vote for the governing parties. The results of these estimations for the economic variables are shown in Table 2

Discussion and conclusion

2009 was a tricky election for German voters. Held in the midst of a worldwide economic meltdown and with an unusual governing coalition in charge, it featured a complex economic environment and complicated political constellations. Economic conditions were clearly not good, but it was also clear that the incumbent government could shoulder only limited responsibility for the onslaught of bad economic news. And while the exogenous shock was real, the reality of the Grand Coalition and the

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference “The 2009 German Federal Election”, University of Kansas, April 26, 2010. We thank the conference participants, and in particular Russell Dalton, and Hans-Dieter Klingemann for their constructive comments and discussion. In addition, we are grateful to Robert Rohrschneider and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and detailed comments. The data used in this paper were made available by GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für

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