This is a most impressive book. In it, Duch and Stevenson have assembled data from 163 surveys in eighteen countries in order to address the following questions: (1) Is there an economic vote? and (2) How is the economic vote conditioned by institutional and political factors to vary across space and time? The very act of assembling such a dataset, and standardizing its questions across different survey research traditions, has to stand as a monument to the dedication of the authors. But the book does much more. In particular, it develops and tests an elaborate theory of economic voting that supposes that, at least in most political systems, voters are able to tease out from the information at their disposal the extent to which incumbent governments are responsible for fluctuations in economic conditions. This model builds on the “party competence” theory of voting behavior but is far more elaborate than any version I have previously seen, particularly in supposing that the voter can distinguish the extent to which the economy in any given country is governed by “electorally dependent decision-makers” (EDDs) as opposed to decision-makers insulated from political control—or “non-electorally dependent decision-makers” (NEDDs) in Duch and Stevenson's terminology. This approach to economic voting enables these authors to place under a single theoretical umbrella a large variety of circumstances that might impinge on voters' abilities to apportion credit or blame to governing parties for economic conditions—circumstances that in past work have been seen as unconnected theoretically (independent central banks and distributed decision-making powers, for example)—with major implications for the model's ability to handle real-world variations in institutional contexts in a powerful and parsimonious fashion.

Before I assess these empirical and theoretical innovations, I should mention a potential conflict of interest. I am a co-author of the only other monograph published since 1989 that takes a comparative approach to assessing the nature and extent of economic voting, a 2007 volume from the same publisher taking an approach to the topic that is as different as can reasonably be imagined. So I do have an axe to grind in this review, but I will try to maintain transparency so that readers can assess my comments on their merits.

Let me say first of all that I think the theoretical innovation of distinguishing EDDs from NEDDs is probably the greatest contribution to be derived from this book, and one that will color research into economic voting for the foreseeable future, incorporating as it does the “clarity of responsibility” from G. B. Powell and G. D. Whitten (1993). The actual model that Duch and Stevenson employ is far more elaborate than required to implement this insight, and contains a number of quite heroic assumptions that could easily be questioned, for example that government parties are able to choose the inflation rate that pertains in the country that they govern, and that voters know the expected value and variance of the distributions both of party competency and also of random shocks that affect the economy. That voters in practice would know any of these four things is utterly implausible, and the authors do not make it clear to what extent their model actually depends on these assumptions or the consequences of relaxing them. It seems to me that the same theory could be built on far more plausible assumptions, but then it would not enjoy the rational choice underpinnings that the authors set much store by. The chapter in which the model is developed is actually a tour de force of rational choice theorizing, which will delight some readers and exasperate others.

But the most important issue that I take with this book is simple: economic perceptions of variations in the real economy are taken from survey data and are not checked against actual variations in real economic conditions. Duch and Stevenson are exhaustive in their survey of literature that suggests the lack of any real connection between perceptions and the real economy, and they address the question with an elaborate analysis that compares their measure of economic voting with a measure that has supposedly been “corrected” by taking account of various factors suggested in this literature as contaminating perceptions of the economy. The correlation between the corrected and uncorrected measures that emerge from this exercise appears to be impressive (though it is displayed in terms of a chart in which the economic vote has been aggregated to the party level, thus averaging out individual-level discrepancies); but even if corrected evaluations correlate highly with uncorrected evaluations (the ones actually employed in the book), this does not tell us that either measure is related to actual economic conditions—though it is, in fact, not very clear what relationship should be expected to obtain between actual economic conditions and the measure of economic voting employed in this book.

This problem derives from a rather curious research design in which the measurement of economic voting is divorced from the theory and analysis that follows. The actual measure is based on the simple notion that economic voting occurs when party choice is affected by economic perceptions (with appropriate controls). So the measure is the estimated change in vote attributable to a simulated (standard) change in economic perceptions for each survey respondent. It is this simulated effect that constitutes the dependent variable for most of the analyses conducted in this book—a considerable departure from accepted analysis procedures.

Despite this problem with its methodology, the book is well worth reading, tying together as it does a wealth of theorizing that had previously appeared unrelated and reaching substantive conclusions that illuminate our understanding of the act of voting—especially the extent to which it is subject to contextual variation—even if there are unanswered questions about how well these conclusions illuminate the effects of real economic conditions.