projects

Do surging housing prices fuel economic anxiety? Recent research linking housing prices and electoral outcomes suggests that they do. However, this literature often takes for granted that individuals follow the market and re-evaluate their economic standing accordingly. This paper interrogates this key assumption by testing whether renters react to housing market information provided to them. By means of two experiments conducted in the United States and Canada using fine grained data on local housing prices, I show that informing respondents of the cost of home ownership in their locality triggers economic anxiety among tenants. This information also affects their perceived financial capacity to move elsewhere and their fear of being priced out from their neighbourhood. The results highlight the effective fear of gentrification among tenants. It entails important implications for our understanding of the political consequences of housing prices, the economic anxiety it may generate, and for whom.

While it is widely acknowledged that local economic conditions influence economic perceptions, current studies overlook residents' travel patterns, thereby limiting the extent to which such measures capture the economic conditions that individuals are exposed to. This research note aims to overcome this empirical barrier by accounting for precise commute habits from home to work, enabling a more comprehensive assessment of the local economic context. By analyzing extensive data on workers' travel patterns from home to work in the United States over a span of seven years, in conjunction with unemployment rates (US Census) and economic perceptions from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), my findings confirm the significance of economic conditions at an individual's place of residence. However, a weighted measure of the overall economic context to which citizens are exposed, tailored based on the commute habits for each zip code, yields more substantial results. These findings not only reaffirm the presence of spatial myopia among voters, as supported by the existing literature on economic voting, but also shed light on the crucial role of commuting patterns in shaping economic perceptions.

The literature on economic voting is well-established in political science. While many studies examine the heterogeneity under which the economic vote is at work, the role of social spending is understudied. We extend the study of the welfare state’s moderating effect on the economic vote by looking at whether a high level of social spending or an increase in cash benefits close to the election can alleviate the impact of a weak economy. An analysis of 219 elections in 29 established democracies suggests that levels and changes in social spending do not moderate the economic vote, even when accounting for the ideological leaning of the incumbent. These results suggest that the economic vote is more robust than sometimes assumed.

The rise of radical-right parties across democracies has prompted researchers to investigate the sources of their success. Factors such as the economy, immigration or identity politics are the usual suspects in this research stream. We know less about factors that contribute to the sustained growth of radical-right parties after an initial breakthrough. One argument holds that these parties benefit especially from the visibility that they gain when they win elections. The present study attempts to isolate the unique effect of visibility and overcome empirical limitations by focusing on the two-round system as applied in legislative and local elections in France. We use election data from 1978 to 2019 at the constituency and local level and leverage the quasi-random nature of runoff qualification in the French electoral system to gauge the effect of the presence of radical-right parties that barely crossed the threshold – and hence gained visibility without necessarily winning the election – on radical-right success in the closest next election. This study contributes to the broader literature on the conditions that explain the electoral success of radical-right parties.