Introduction

Common sense and abundant empirical evidence appear to indicate that voters respond to economic conditions. Ceteris paribus, when such conditions are good, people support governments; when the economy deteriorates, this support suffers. It has thus been claimed that “the proposition that voters will punish incumbents for poor performance should not be controversial” (Kiewiet and Rivers, 1985:225). If true, such a conclusion would provide empirical confirmation for standard conceptions of democratic accountability. Yet voters may accurately assess the economic situation and still find reasons not to act on these assessments. Indeed, they may decide how to vote first, and only then look for ways of rationalizing their decisions in the face of economic circumstances. We discuss the economic interpretation of voting using empirical evidence from Spanish politics between 1980 and 1995.

Models of economic voting postulate that voters base their decisions on the grounds of economic performance, either past or future. According to one tradition of electoral research, the only information that enters into voters' decisions concerns their past experience. Voters assess economic outcomes under the present government, ignore promises about the future, and implement the reward-punishment mechanism. As Key (1966:61) put it, the voter is simply “an appraiser of past events, past performance, and past actions. It judges retrospectively; it commands prospectively only insofar as it expresses either approval or disapproval of that which has happened before. Voters may reject what they have known; or they may approve what they have known.