Issue Voting over the Business Cycle

• Applicant: Professor Mark Kayser, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 529635308

The primary objective of this project is to confirm the existence of an important voting regularity, i.e., that voters decrease support for the political left in economic downturns, and to provide it with theoretical and empirical micro-foundations beyond traditional economic voting theory. Substantively, this would make a contribution to public understanding of the political economy of policy-making. Puzzles such as the shift of many electorates to the right after the Great Recession would be less surprising in this context, as would be the counter-intuitive emergence of measures promoting fiscal austerity and cutting the welfare state. Academically, the explanation that I investigate for this voting regularity, the material issues vote, would bridge a gap in the voting literature between retrospective economic voting, that relates to incumbents’ economic record, and prospective issue voting, that relates to parties’ general issue associations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Tarik Abou-Chadi