Heterogeneous perceptions of economic conditions in cross-national perspective

There have been two particularly important recent contributions to our understanding of economic voting. One of these contributions, primarily based on American data, is that economic voting exhibits considerable heterogeneity and thus different segments of the population respond differently to objective fluctuations in the economy. A second recent contribution to this literature concerns the importance of institutions in shaping the manner in which vote choice or incumbent evaluation responds to the economy. This chapter builds on both these recent contributions in an effort to better understand the cross-national economic voting. We demonstrate that systematic differences between subjective and objective characterizations of the economy at the aggregate level are, to some extent, the result of subjective heterogeneity in economic evaluations at the individual level. We speculate that different institutional contexts may affect the extent, or direction, of this subjective heterogeneity that in turn may contribute to cross-national variations in economic voting.