How does economic openness affect the relative economic voting?

Abstract

Contrary to conventional wisdom, globalization strengthens the linkage between the economy (across-border benchmarked measures) and vote choice, thereby facilitating electoral accountability by enriching the information available to the public. In the pre-globalization era, ordinary citizens had difficulty assessing domestic economic conditions in a comparative setting, in part because they were less exposed to information concerning other countries’ economic performance. However, globalization has provided citizens with excellent sources for comparisons in the form of media coverage. Moreover, openness results in a reduction in relative variance of exogenous rather than competence shocks. Using media-guided comparisons from 29 countries since the 1980s, this study finds that relative economic performance significantly affects citizens’ vote choices when their economy is highly integrated into the world market.