Democracy for Realists, Part 15 of 19
Elections are almost completely random events. When the economy is good, voters vote for the incumbent. When the economy is bad, voters vote against the incumbent.
Elections are almost completely random events. When the economy is good, voters vote for the incumbent. When the economy is bad, voters vote against the incumbent. This happens even when the politicians cannot possibly have any control of events, and this happens no matter what policies the politicians stand for. When things are bad, then even when some out-of-power candidate advocates for policies that will clearly make the situation worse, the public will vote for them so as to express their rage at the incumbent.
Consider this:
Democracy for Realists, 2016
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 205
A crucial feature of this brief litany of electoral responses to the Depression is that the ideological interpretation customarily provided for voters’ reactions in the United States does not turn out to travel well. Where conservatives were in power when the Depression hit they were often replaced with liberals or socialists, as in the United States and Sweden. But where relatively leftist governments were in power during significant downturns they were often replaced with more conservative alternatives, as in Britain and Australia. Where the existing party system was oriented around noneconomic issues, as in Ireland, voters rejected the “ins” and replaced them with “outs” whose policy positions cannot even be sensibly classified in left-right terms. Where the timing of elections forced more than one major party to stand for reelection during the worst years of the Depression, as in Canada and Sweden, voters seem to have been perfectly willing to reject both in turn. Where complex coalition politics diffused responsibility, as in France and Germany, discontented citizens turned to unstable coalitions, to fringe parties, or to the streets. Simply put, there is no consistent ideological logic evident in voters’ responses to the Depression when we look beyond the American case. When voters got a chicken in every pot at election time, they usually liked the incumbent party’s ideology just fine, whatever it happened to be. But when incomes eroded and unemployment escalated, they became ripe for defection to anyone who promised to bring home the poultry.