Voting for Growth, Fairness, or Inequality? Class-Biased Economic Voting in Comparative Perspective (original) (raw)

The economic voting literature posits a positive connection between average income growth and the electoral performance of incumbent politicians. More rare, however, is consideration of the implications for electoral outcomes of the distribution of income growth across societies. We advance the view that, especially in modern contexts of high economic inequality driven by large gains for top-income citizens, there are good reasons to augment the classic economic voting models to account for the distributive aspect of growth. Theoretically, we motivate our arguments with reference to misperceptions of economic information, ideological predispositions, and "system justification theory". Empirically, we demonstrate that the original class-biased economic voting (CBEV) finding using election study data for the U.S. in Bartels (2008) can be replicated in both Canada and Sweden, but not the U.K.. Further, we show that the most intriguing feature of CBEV -electoral rewards for top-income growth -is present in a much larger sample of around 220 elections across 15 advanced industrialized countries.