Science is the product not only of reason, but also of sentiments and passions. This particular book is the offspring of two opposite sentiments: disenchantment and enthusiasm. Disenchanted though we were with much of the literature in the field of economic voting, our enthusiasm derived from newly emerging possibilities for systematic comparative studies of electoral processes.

Many of the publications in the field of economic voting are highly sophisticated in their modeling and analyses of empirical data, yet – in our view – often highly implausible when approached from first principles in the light of straightforward observations of the political world, and in the light of what we believed we had learned from our own earlier comparative analyses of voters and elections. As a case in point, analysts commonly group parties in two categories, those in government and those in opposition. This crude dichotomy obviously does not reflect the kind of choice that voters are faced with in multiparty systems. Moreover, when analyzing the effects of “the” economy on voters, categorizing the world in this way has the effect of discarding and disregarding all sorts of other characteristics of parties that are likely to contribute to party choice. Moreover, election results show that, more often than not, the electoral fortunes of coalition partners diverge considerably, thus calling into doubt the simple logic that government parties are rewarded or punished for the way the economy performed under their stewardship.