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Voters' wrath? Policy change and government popularity
Author(s) -
Arndt Christoph,
Jensen Carsten,
Wenzelburger Georg
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
governance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.46
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1468-0491
pISSN - 0952-1895
DOI - 10.1111/gove.12483
Subject(s) - popularity , government (linguistics) , construct (python library) , legislature , unemployment , german , control (management) , perspective (graphical) , core (optical fiber) , political science , political economy , economics , public economics , law , macroeconomics , history , philosophy , linguistics , materials science , management , archaeology , artificial intelligence , computer science , composite material , programming language
Recent research suggests that voters are bad at responding in a meaningful way to policy events when deciding for whom to vote. Voters rely on so‐called “blind retrospection”, punishing governments for events outside politicians' control. However, another core aspect of the blind retrospection perspective has not been put to the test: are voters unable to respond to policy decisions that clearly are under the politicians' control? We construct a unique large‐N dataset on legislative changes in German old age pensions and unemployment protection to see if cutbacks and expansions lead to lower/higher support for the government. Our data are exceptionally fine‐grained and allow us to track the policy‐vote link for 416 months from 1977 to 2013 with a total of 329,167 respondents. We find substantial support for the notion that voters react in a meaningful way to policy changes, but also that they can be distracted by high‐profile, extreme events.