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Electoral Studies 31 (2012) 498–505

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Electoral Studies

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/e lectstud

Economic voting under the economic crisis: Evidence from Greece

Roula Nezi*

Department of Public Administration, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 13 February 2012Accepted 15 February 2012

Keywords:Economic votingEconomic perceptionsElectionsGreeceEconomic crisis

* Tel.: þ31 645657743.E-mail address: s.nezi@utwente.nl.

0261-3794/$ – see front matter � 2012 Elsevier Ltddoi:10.1016/j.electstud.2012.02.007

a b s t r a c t

Having joined the Eurozone in 2001, Greece experienced a short period of economiceuphoria before confronting a major financial crisis some nine years later. In the periodbetween joining the Eurozone and accepting the joint IMF/EU bailout package, theeconomic situation facing Greek voters changed dramatically. I use this setting to test theeconomic voting hypothesis. Using longitudinal aggregate data from 1981 to 2009, Iinvestigate the relationship between macroeconomic indicators and vote share of theincumbent party to test the “grievance asymmetry” hypothesis. Moreover, by usingindividual-level data from 2004 to 2009, I investigate the extent to which retrospectivesociotropic evaluations about the state of the economy are associated with support for theincumbent party. The results suggest that sociotropic economic evaluations are associatedwith government party support, but in a period when the economy is at its worst theincumbent has no real chance of winning and should expect support only from its long-time loyal supporters.

� 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

2009 inaugurated themost difficult period for the Greekeconomy in recent times. For the past two years, theeconomic problems facing Greece have been making front-page news around the world. For many who wereimpressed by the country’s achievements over the pastdecade this was an unexpected development (Kalaitzidis,2010). Greece after all was among the first group of coun-tries accepted into the Eurozone. By 2004 economic activitywas booming in anticipation of the Olympic Games, whileunemployment was falling (Kasimati and Dawson, 2009).In the March 2004 election, the conservative ND (NewDemocracy) party had won a decisive victory, endingeleven years of rule by the Panhellenic Socialist Move(PASOK) (Panagopoulos and Marantzidis, 2006). PASOK’shistorical defeat at the 2004 election was at to increasingsigns of corruption in the government. The conservativeopposition leader, Kostas Karamanlis presented himself as

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a modest politician who would fight corruption andproceed with the necessary reforms (Dinas, 2010).

By 2009, however, Greece’s debt and budget deficit hadrisen to alarming levels. On September 2, 2009, PrimeMinister Karamanlis announced a snap election. Thisdecision was due to the difficulties facing the NewDemocracy (ND) government regarding reforms that wouldhelp handle the effects of the global recession, but also dueto a series of scandals that led to the resignation of three NDministers within less than a year (Gemenis, 2010). Duringthe electoral campaign, Karamanlis presented ND as theonly party refraining from making promises regarding theeconomic policy it would follow after the elections.Furthermore, he claimed credit for being sincere about theactual economic situation of the country, which he por-trayed as a product of the global financial crisis (Dinas,2010). Despite Karamanlis’ efforts, PASOK won the elec-tion with a comfortable majority (43.9% of votes and 160 of300 Parliamentary seats), on the premise that the economywas not doing well because of the poormanagement by theconservative government.

Research has demonstrated that, in advanced democ-racies, perceptions of economic issues are central for

R. Nezi / Electoral Studies 31 (2012) 498–505 499

parties’ electoral success (Lewis-Beck and Paldam, 2000).The elections of 2004 and 2009 provide us with a goodopportunity to study the extent to which perceptions aboutthe state of the economy affect citizens’ electoral choices,given that 2004 was a period of relative economic stabilityand that 2009 marked the onset of the current economiccrisis. Given the lack of studies investigating the role ofeconomic voting in the Greek context, the analysis seeks tofill an important gap in the literature. The remainder of thispaper is structured as follows. In Section 2, previous find-ings regarding economic voting in a comparative contextare discussed as well as some findings within the Greekcontext. In Section 3, I use longitudinal aggregate data toillustrate the relationship between macroeconomic indi-cators and support for the incumbent party and in Section4, I offer evidence from individual-level analyses based onelection studies conducted in 2004 and 2009. In particular, Ipresent descriptive evidence regarding voters’ perceptionsabout the most important issues facing the country andinvestigate how retrospective sociotropic evaluationsabout the state of the economy are associated with theprobability to vote for the incumbent party. The implica-tions of the findings are discussed in the concludingsection.

2. Theories of economic voting and previous evidencefor Greece

In its simplest form, the idea behind economic voting isthat voters are not “fools” but make rational judgmentsabout what happened to the economy in the past (Key,1966). Although prospective evaluations can also be rele-vant, foreseeing is not as easy as reminiscing. “Voters, or atleast a large number of them”, Key (1966, 150) argued, “aremoved by their perceptions and appraisals of policy andperformance”. Building on Key (1966) and Downs (1957),Fiorina (1981) further substantiated the point aboutretrospective evaluations by arguing that even uninformedvoters “have one comparatively hard bit of data: they knowwhat life has been like during the incumbent’s adminis-tration.” Based on such evaluations, the voter can hold thegovernment accountable and “toss the rascals out”. Hence,it is relatively straightforward to reward and re-elect thegovernment or to punish it and vote for the opposition.

Apart from the importance of past or future assess-ments, there is also demarcation between sociotropicattitudes of voters concerned with the country’s economicsituation, and egocentric attitudes of those interested morein their personal financial situation. Retrospective socio-tropic evaluations have been shown to have a higherimpact on party choice, even though from a theoreticalperspective we would expect that voters would be moreinterested in their personal financial situation (Kinder andKiewiet, 1979). However, egocentric evaluations haveprovedmore important than sociotropic ones in Britain andDenmark (Lewis-Beck and Paldam, 2000).

Early analyses of economic voting were by and largebased on aggregate level data, i.e. linking electoral results tomacroeconomic indicators. Aggregate level models havebeen employed to operationalize the idea of rationaleconomic voting by testing for a statistically significant

association between the vote and several macroeconomicmeasures such as GDP per capita, GDP growth, inflation,unemployment or taxation at country or cross-nationallevel (Lewis-Beck, 1988; Sanders, 2005; Wilkin et al., 1997).

Due to the lack of systematic analyses of economicvoting on Greece, the scarce knowledge we have in thisrespect is based on the comparative study by Freire andCosta Lobo (2005) and on a case study analysis by. Freireand Costa Lobo (2005) examined the effect of objectiveindicators and subjective individual perceptions of theeconomy on voting behavior in Greece, Portugal and Spainbetween 1984 and 1999 and found that in Greece there isa correlation between the perceptions of personal financesand the annual changes in the GDP. Using Eurobarometerdata, the authors tested for the importance of the economyon the vote between 1985 and 2000 and found that themost important single factor determining party choice wasideology. However, the argument about the importance ofeconomic evaluations and their relationship to party choicehas not yet been tested empirically for recent elections.Before turning to individual-level data, however, I firstexamine economic voting at the aggregate level.

3. Aggregate level analysis of economic voting

The main argument which links macroeconomicperformance to support for the incumbent party is thereward-punishment hypothesis. From this perspective,voters evaluate governments’ performance on majoreconomic indicators, such as inflation or unemployment.Then they reward or punish the incumbent based on itsperformance on keeping these macroeconomic indicatorsat the desirable levels (Sanders, 2000). In other words thegovernment is accountable over the economic policy-making. In addition, political parties at the opposition canhope for voters’ support when the performance of the partyin government is considered inadequate (Lewis-Beck, 1988;Powell and Whitten, 1993).

Given that negative economic conditions are assumedto have a negative effect on the vote for the incumbent,while positive economic conditions are assumed to havea positive effect, we expect that voters reactions towardsthe economy are symmetric. One exception to the abovementioned hypothesis comes from what is know in theliterature of economic voting as “grievance asymmetry”,a psychological mechanism whereby people appreciate animprovement in the economy less than they dislike thecorresponding deterioration. In one of the first studiesabout grievance asymmetry Mueller (1970) suggested thatthe impact of unemployment on vote is asymmetric. Themain idea behind Muller’s analysis is that the economyshould have a certain saliency to the electorate in order toinfluence the vote and that bad times, like economicdownturns or an economic crisis, are more salient thangood ones. According to Mueller’s analysis, voters react tovariations in macroeconomic variables only above or belowa certain threshold. As other scholars have suggested,however, the problem lies in determining the correctthreshold value. Bloom and Price (1975) definition of“grievance asymmetry” proposes that the governmentloses more support when the economy is deteriorating

1 Since we are interested in retrospective economic voting, whenelections were held after June the change was calculated as tx � tx � 1

where x denotes the election year. When elections were held before Junechange was calculated as tx�1 � tx�2 instead.

2 The only election which is not included in the analysis is the one ofApril 1990. In this election, both PASOK and ND were incumbents as theywere part of a short-lived grand coalition.

R. Nezi / Electoral Studies 31 (2012) 498–505500

than it wins when the economy is improving. In times ofprosperity, long-term factors such as party identification ormore salient short-term issues dominate party choice. Incontrast, in times of economic downturn there are evidencethat economic conditions do have a higher effect.

Studies on German and British data support Mueller’shypotheses that the electorate responds to economicconditions only when the latter deteriorate sharply (seeNannestad and Paldam, 1997, 85). Does the same holds forthe individual-level analysis? Attempts to verify the“grievance hypothesis” at the individual level have notbeen successful (Kiewiet, 1983; Lewis-Beck, 1988) with theexception of the Danish electorate (Nannestad and Paldam,1997). Conversely, van der Brug et al. (2007) have foundsupport for the “grievance asymmetry” hypothesis in theircross-national assessment of economic voting. Thesepositive findings may be related to the fact that the authorstook a more permissive view on what constitutes anasymmetry. Instead of expecting the coefficients onimproving economic conditions to be near zero (Lewis-Beck, 1988, 78), they reported some substantial differ-ences in the magnitude of the impact between improvingand deteriorating economic conditions (van der Brug et al.,2007, 142–159).

Previous individual-level simulations on the electoralconsequences of changingeconomic conditions (vander Bruget al., 2007, 142–159) suggested that in Greece, votersrespondedtothe improvementsof theeconomybyrewardingthe governing party in terms of vote intentions and that therewards were slightly stronger than the punishments. Thelack of coalition governments,makes it a high-clarity countryas it is veryeasy for voters to identify thepartyaccountable forgovernment policies. The Greek party system has been char-acterized by stable single-party governments, largely due tothe disproportional electoral system (called “reinforcedproportional representation” in Greek political parlance)which has been amended several times since the restorationof democracy in 1974. With the exception of the quasi-caretaker coalition governments of 1989–1990 (Verney,1990), ND and PASOK have been alternating in government,while all other parties remained in opposition.

So what is the relationship between support for theincumbent party and objective economic conditions? Inorder to examine this relationship, I employ as measures ofthe state of the economy three indicators: unemploymentrate, GDP growth rate and inflation rate expressed aschange compared to the previous year (IMF, 2011). Theseare not the only measures available but they have twoadvantages compared to other economic indicators. First,they ensure comparability across time as they aremeasured in a standardized way. Second, they providea good picture of the economic situation of the country.Thirdly, these three indicators are the most frequently citedones (by parties and the media) which implies that votersare familiar with them.

Fig. 1 shows locally weighted regression curves fittedonto three scatterplots where the dependent variable issupport for the incumbent party measured by the incum-bents’ vote share. Each of the scatterplots investigates therelationship between each of the economic indicators (GDP,unemployment, inflation expressed as change compared to

the previous year1) and support for the incumbent party foreach national election between 1981 and 2009.2 As all non-parametric regression methods, the basic idea behind thelowess curve is to mediate the problem of distributionassumptions which are difficult to meet with a smallnumber of observations (N ¼ 10) (Fitzmaurice et al., 2004,70). In addition, lowess curves are useful when we want todescribe non-linear relationships between variables(Jacoby, 2000). A dashed vertical to the X axis line indicatesthe point at which a change in the trend of the relationshipbetween the variables can be observed. This is thethreshold described by Mueller (1970) which differentiatesbetween punishments and (potential) rewards. Accordingto the “grievance asymmetry” hypothesis, wewould expectto see a trend on the side where economic indicators aredeteriorating and a flat line on the side where economicindicators are improving. In other words, we shouldobserve a change in the shape of the pattern after thedashed line.

The scatterplots in Fig. 1 (bandwidth ¼ 0.7) showa rather mixed picture but there is some evidence sug-gesting that there is an asymmetry between fluctuations atthe state of the economy and vote share for the governingparty. When we examine each macroeconomic indicatorseparately we see that decreases in the GDP are associatedwith decreases in the vote for the incumbent party and viceversa but there is evidence for a threshold at 2.5% change.After this point it seems that incumbents are not rewardedfor improving the indicator for growth. Turning to inflationit seems that increases in the rate of inflation up to about17% are not associated with decreases in the vote for theincumbent. To the contrary, it seems that the voters areslightly rewarding the party. After this threshold, however,there is a steep decrease in the vote for the incumbent,although the number of observations after this threshold isvery small to make definite judgments. Finally, changes inthe unemployment rate between �1% and 1% are notassociated with changes in the vote for the governing partyas evident by the near flat curve. Similarly, to inflation, weobserve a steep trend after the threshold indicatinga punishment for the incumbents although the number ofobservations is very small.

Of course, it is impossible tomake inferences from thesescatterplots but the results are indicative and quite robustto alternative operationalizations of the dependent vari-able, such as the percentage of the combined vote share ofthe two major parties (see Dinas, 2010, 394–395), or theemployment of the multivariable mlowess procedurewhich examines each macroeconomic indicator whilecontrolling for the remaining two. In the next section, Icomplement this evidencewith an individual-level analysisfocusing on the 2004 and 2009 election years.

3035

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Inflation rate change

3035

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Fig. 1. Macroeconomic indicators and support for the incumbent party, 1981–2009.

010

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Much worseWorse

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%(snoitaulave

evitcepsorterciportoicoS

Much worseWorse

About the sameBetter

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Fig. 2. Economic evaluations: 2004 and 2009.

R. Nezi / Electoral Studies 31 (2012) 498–505 501

4. The Greek economic voter

I start by assuming the incumbency hypothesis, whichhas been inspired by the work of Key (1966), namely thatevaluations about the state of the economy, and moreprecisely retrospective evaluations, should have an impacton party choice. Economic voting theories are mainly basedon the premise that voters’ party preferences depend onthe economic performance of the governing party. If citi-zens’ evaluations about the state of the economy are posi-tive, the government should be also evaluated positively.Moreover, if a country is hit by an economic crisis as Greecewas in 2009, then we expect that “bad times hurt the ins”(Kramer, 1971). From the analysis we also know that it isharder for governing parties to improve their support evenwhen economic times are good while the same improve-ment of the economy usually does not have an effect on theopposition parties. Economic downturns, cost governingparties a portion of their vote share and benefit oppositionparties. Now that most European countries are hit by theeconomic crisis the main question is whether and how theeconomic crisis shapes economic voting.

Since the current global financial crisis is a recent event,there are only a few published studies about the impact ofthe current crisis on party choice. Palmer and Whitten(2011) investigated whether the economic vote calculusdiffers during periods of economic crisis in the UK. Theirresults suggested that negative effects of changes in infla-tion and unemployment on support for the Labour partyappeared to be largely attributable to the post-2006 periodwhen the economic crisis emerged. Furthermore, theirresults suggest that those voters who exhibited aneconomic voting behavior, lower-skill, lower-incomeworkers, are more sensitive to unemployment duringperiods of economic crisis since unemployment is a moreserious concern during the economic downturn whileinflation emerges as a concern as the economy begins torecover. Turning to Canada, the analysis by Clarke et al.(2011) suggests that citizens perceptions that the leaderof the governing party was best able to handle the mostimportant issue, the economy, gave him an importantadvantage over his rivals even though critics blamed himfor the country’s faltering economy. In Germany the effect

of the 2008 financial crisis did not have a dominant effecton the electoral decisions of German voters. Two explana-tions where given. First as Rattinger and Steinbrecher(2011) argue, the lack of stronger effects of economicvoting is partly a result of the successful actions of thegrand coalition to reduce the consequences of theeconomic and financial crisis. Secondly, the analysis byAnderson and Hecht (2012) suggests that voters decidednot to blame the government for the nation’s economicdownturns since they treated the economic crisis as a shockexogenous to the domestic politics. Turning to Greece, I

010

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Economy

UnemploymentInflation

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Economy

Unemployment

Effects of financial crisis

Political CorruptionOther

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Fig. 3. Issue salience, 2004 and 2009.

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examine economic voting for the 2004 and 2009 electionyears. The lack of national election study in Greece makesthe study of economic voting rather difficult given theabsence of datasets with comparable questions abouteconomic evaluations. In order to overcome this problem Iuse a pre-election survey from the polling company VPRCfor the parliamentary 2004 election, and the 2009 Euro-pean Election Study for 2009 (European Election Study,2011; van Egmond et al., 2010).

Fig. 2 suggests that comparing the 2004 to the 2009election (the latter taking place a fewmonths before Greeceagreed to a bailout package with the IMF/EU), thepercentage of voters who negatively evaluated theeconomy increased by almost 20 percent. In 2004, fiveyears before the economic crisis, the percentage of those

Table 1Economic voting in Greece: logistic regressions on support for the incumbent pa

2004

b SE (b)

Sociotropic retrospective evaluation 0.610 0.130Left–Right self-placement �0.221 0.063Party identification 2.166 0.165Unemployed �0.156 0.520Age �0.002 0.007Male �0.370 0.245Constant 1.356 0.560N 940Pseudo R2 0.645

who evaluated the economy as a lot worse was 24.4% whilein 2009 it increased to 43.9%. Nevertheless, if economicconsiderations are to play an important role in voters’minds, the economy has to be a salient issue for them(Whiteley et al., 2005). In both surveys, issue salience wasmeasured by an open-ended questions asking respondersto name the most important problem facing the country.Respondents were asked to mention up to two issues in2004 and three in 2009. In both elections, economic issueswere by far the most important in voters’ minds. For bothelections the Greek public mentioned the economy ingeneral and inflation and unemployment in particular asthe most important problems facing the country, far aheadof issues such as health, immigration, education or theenvironment. As we move from 2004 to 2009 two impor-tant changes occurred: the importance of the economy asthe most important problem is raised by almost 20%, fol-lowed by a decline on the importance of unemployment asan issue. In addition, a few months before the 2009 elec-tion, political corruption (7.8%) and the effects of the globaleconomic crisis (5%) entered the agenda Fig. 3.

Since I am interested on the impact of the economicvariables on the support for the incumbent party I performa logistic regression analysis where the dependent variableis coded 1 if the respondent intends to vote for theincumbent and 0 for the intention to vote for any otherparty at the opposition (Lewis-Beck and Nadeau, 2000;Evans and Andersen, 2006). The logistic regression modelsallow us to estimate the probability that the voter willselect the incumbent versus other parties and to examinehow this distribution of probabilities changes whenperceptions of the economy change. Yet as in most studies,vote choice is considered a function of temporary effects asthe economic evaluations, long-term effects as partyidentification and ideology and demographics such as ageand gender (Clarke et al., 2004).

The primary independent variables of interest areeconomic evaluationsmeasured as retrospective sociotropicevaluations. The retrospective sociotropic question is thefollowing: “What do you think about the economy?Compared to 12 months ago, do you think the economy isa lot better, a little better, stayed the same, a little worse,a lot worse”. The responses to this questions have beenrecoded to a five point scale ranging from �2 when thenational economy is evaluated by the electorate as “muchworse” to 2 when is evaluated as “much better”. Ideology is

rty.

2009

Odds ratio b SE (b) Odds ratio

1.840 0.741 0.210 2.0990.801 0.404 0.100 1.4988.722 3.165 0.415 23.6790.855 �0.818 0.739 0.4410.998 0.017 0.014 1.0170.690 0.328 0.408 1.388

�3.606 0.8494940.730

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Fig. 4. Probabilities (with 95% CIs) to vote for the incumbent for different levels of the economic evaluations and left–right self-placement, 2004.

3 Leader evaluations are not included in the model, but in Greece, thesehave been shown to have an impact which is indistinguishable from theimpact of ideology (Dinas, 2008).

4 To plot the quantities of interest from the Clarify software, I used theCLEAR-PLOT package by Travis Braidwood (Braidwood, 2011).

R. Nezi / Electoral Studies 31 (2012) 498–505 503

measured by the standard question asking respondents toplace themselves on the Left–Right scale which is a contin-uous measure from 1 to 10 and 0 to 10 for the 2004 and2009 respectively. Party identification is coded 0 for thosewho do not identify with any party and ranges from �2 forthose who strongly identify with the opposition to 2 forthose who strongly identify with the incumbent. Sinceprevious studies about the impact of the economy on partychoice have underlined that citizens employment statusmight be a relevant factor in the Greek context (Kafe, 2007).I included in the model a dichotomous variable indicatingwhether the respondent is unemployed.

Table 1 displays the empirical results. As hypothesized,the coefficients for the economic variable turn out to bestatistically significant and in the expected direction. In the2004 national election, voters on the left side of the ideo-logical spectrum were more likely to support the socialistgoverning party, PASOK. This also holds for voters whobelieved that the economic situation had been positive theyear before the national election as well as those whoidentified with the incumbent. Furthermore, none of thesociodemographic variables are statistically significant.Moving to the 2009 estimates the pattern is repeated.Voters who positively evaluated the economy were morelikely to vote for the incumbent. Since the incumbent at the2009 national elections was the conservative ND, thosewho placed themselves at the right side of the ideologicalspectrum also tended to vote for ND. The analysis so farsuggests that economic evaluations by the Greek electorateare associated with support for the incumbent party. Eventhough in 2004 the macroeconomic measures indicatedthat the economy was performing quite well, and one mayassume that the salience of the economy as an issue duringthe electoral campaign would be of less importance,retrospective evaluations about the economy exhibita substantive association with support for the incumbentparty.

Of course this substantive association does not neces-sarily imply a cause and effect relationship betweeneconomic evaluations and party choice. Previous researchhas shown that the effect of economic evaluations could beendogenous to party choice (Anderson et al., 2004; van derEijk et al., 2007; Wlezien et al., 1997). This means thatperceptions about the state of the economy might beactually the product of voting intention. To find a theoret-ical framework for this argument we might turn to theclassic theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957)which implies that ‘if an individual performs an activity

that is antithetical to his beliefs, the individual mayunconsciously change his beliefs to alleviate the discomfortof having inconsistent attitudes and actions’ (Mullainathanand Washington, 2009, 86–87). From that perspectivecitizens who have already made a decision for which partyto vote for, either because of their long-term ideologicalpredispositions or their identificationwith a political party,might perceive the situation of the economy in away that itmatches their political preferences.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to address this endogeneityin a regression model based on cross-sectional data as welack suitable exogenous instruments. Instead, I offera counterfactual argument. If we think of endogeneity interms of an omitted variable problem (Clarke, 2009, 57–58), we would need to think how big the effect of thisomitted variable would have to be in order to invalidate thefindings presented in Table 1. With the most powerfulpredictors included in the model (party identification andleft–right self-placement) it is hard to think of an additionalexplanatory variable which could predict vote for theincumbent party with an odds ratio of at least 1.8.3

Therefore it seems safe to conclude that although wemight be overestimating the impact of economic evalua-tions on support for the incumbent, such an effect probablyexists.

The next question therefore is ‘What the substantiveimpact of economic evaluations in terms of probability tovote for the incumbent is?’ Since the coefficients and oddsratios in logistic regression are not easy to interpret, I usesimulations (Tomz et al., 2003; King et al., 2000) tocompute the probability to vote for the incumbent party.The probabilities (and associated 95% confidence intervals)for each level of economic evaluations are shown in Figs. 4and 5 for the 2004 and 2009 elections respectively.4

In both figures, all independent variables apart fromideology and economic evaluations were set to their mean,median and modal values. This means that partisanshipwas set to “no party identification”, unemployment to“employed”, gender to “male”, and age to the mean (46 and55 respectively). Since ideology is one of the most impor-tant predictors of party choice in Greece, we plot the

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Fig. 5. Probabilities (with 95% CIs) to vote for the incumbent for different levels of the economic evaluations and left–right self-placement, 2009.

R. Nezi / Electoral Studies 31 (2012) 498–505504

probability to vote for the incumbent across the range ofplacements on the Left–Right scale. Furthermore, thevertical line in each figure indicates the position of thegoverning party on the Left–Right scale.5 Of course thesecalculations are unrealistic in a sense that we know thatdemographic characteristics and strengthens of partyidentifications vary in reality. However, they provide usefulinformation for assessing the impact of the economicvariables on support for the incumbent party.

Figs. 4 and 5 show that as we move from negative topositive evaluations about the economy the probability tovote for the incumbent party increases. Nevertheless, theconfidence intervals between the adjacent plots fordifferent levels of evaluation about the economy are over-lapping. This means that if themean evaluations among theelectorate would change one level upwards or downwardswe do not observe any substantive differences in theprobability to vote for the incumbent party. Substantialchanges (indicated by non-overlapping confidence inter-vals) are only observed in 2004 whenwemove from “muchworse” to “much better” evaluations. Moreover, the figureshint that the position of the party on the Left–Right scalemight make a difference for how much gain is to beexpected from positive evaluations about the economy. Thecentrist position of PASOK (indicated by the vertical line)enables it to make gains across the ideological spectrumwhereas for right-wing ND the gains on the left are asso-ciated with much uncertainty. At this point, however, Itcomes from expert surveys: for the 2004 election, the 2003Benoit and Laver (2006) expert survey and for the 2009election the Vowles and Xezonakis (2009) expert survey(Vowles et al., 2010). It is worth keeping in mind that thisuncertainty in the 2009 estimates is due to very fewrespondents that evaluated the economy as “much better”in 2009. Future research could address this issue exten-sively by testing for interactions between ideology andeconomic evaluations on the impact on party choice.

Do these results imply that there was no economicvoting in 2009? On the contrary, the results in Table 1confirm that economic evaluations played an importantrole in both elections but when we take the evidence inFigs. 4 and 5 into account, we can conclude that this“important role” could not have a substantial impact interms of electoral returns for the party in government. Thelatter finding is particularly true for 2009. The high odds

5 For both elections the 2009 ideological position of the incumbent.

ratio (about 23.7) for party identification in Table 1 indi-cates that, in June 2009, only the most loyal supporters ofthe conservatives intended to vote for the incumbent ND.This was confirmed about four months later at the parlia-mentary election of October 2009 where ND had the worstelectoral result in its 35-year history (Gemenis, 2010, 358).

5. Conclusions

In this article I set out to examine the relationshipbetween the economy and voting behavior in Greece forthe 2004 and 2009 election years. More specifically, Iexamined the implications regarding support for incum-bent parties. The aggregate level analysis focusing on therelation between macroeconomic indicators and supportfor the incumbent party showed the existence of thresh-olds which provided some evidence for the “grievanceasymmetry” theory. As in other countries, the Greek elec-torate seems to be punishing the party in governmentwhen economic conditions deteriorate rather thanrewarding it when economic conditions improve. Never-theless, the non-parametric techniques used to study therelationship do not allow for making inferences anddrawing definite conclusions. A multilevel analysis ofeconomic voting which included Greece showed that,when individual-level covariates are taken into account,rewards become as likely as punishments in the Greekcontext (van der Brug et al., 2007, 166). Despite the existingscarcity of Greek electoral data, future studies need toexplore the question of “grievance asymmetry”.

Turning to the individual-level analysis, this articleshowed that retrospective sociotropic evaluations aboutthe economy are associated with support for the governingparty even when powerful predictors of party choice (suchas ideology and party identification) are included in thestatistical model. This was true for both 2004 and 2009.Moreover, the simulation analysis indicated that thisassociation does not always translate into substantive gainsfor the governing party because evaluations have to changeconsiderably in order to determine the final electoraloutcome. To put it simply, economic evaluations do have animpact on support for the incumbent, but in a period whenthe economy is at its worst the incumbent has no realchance of winning and should expect support only from itslong-time loyal supporters. Conversely, the oppositionmight initially gain from the collapse of the incumbent, butin the long run the new government too will have to facethe harsh economic reality. This is what actually happened

R. Nezi / Electoral Studies 31 (2012) 498–505 505

in Greece as the enthusiasm over the landslide victory ofPASOK in 2009 evaporated rather quickly when Greece wasforced to ask for financial help from the IMF and its EUpartners (Gemenis, 2012). In any case, the biggest test forthe economic voting hypothesis in Greece will have to beconducted in the upcoming parliamentary election, whenthe impact of partisanship is expected to decline and theeconomy to be more salient than ever.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Paolo Bellucci, Marina CostaLobo, Kostas Gemenis, Zoe Lefkofridi, Michael Lewis-Beckand the anonymous reviewer, for providing me helpfulcomments and suggestions. I also wish to thank Christo-foros Vernardakis for sharing the VPRC data with me.Of course, any remaining errors or omissions remain myresponsibility.

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