Abstract:
Economic voting is a well-established mechanism in which people make their voting decisions primarily on economic conditions such as household income or a nation’s economic environment. Despite the long history and the sophisticated studies of this field, there is still a lack of research in the aspect of behavioural heuristics in voting decisions. By using election data among thirty-one European nations, this research examines three main voting heuristics regarding people’s perception of the economic condition, aiming to see whether these phenomena could be observed in a large-scale, general condition. The result shows that these behaviours do exist. People in the selected nations are overweighting the election-year economy when making voting decisions; punishing the government more than rewarding it by their votes, and put more emphasis on the relative economic performance in comparison to the EU economy than the economic condition of their own countries.
Keywords: Economic voting, Myopic voting, Negative voting, Benchmark voting, Behavioural heuristics
