Previous research has established that taxation may entail significant electoral costs to politicians. This literature, however, focuses exclusively on the effect of the tax burden. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that both the level of the tax burden and the change in the tax structure...

Previous research has established that taxation may entail significant electoral costs to politicians. This literature, however, focuses exclusively on the effect of the tax burden. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that both the level of the tax burden and the change in the tax structure...

Up to now there was a general conviction that increasing unemployment and inflation have a negative impact on the government’s popularity. This was true for Germany as well, but it does not seem to hold any longer. This paper first reviews the results of earlier periods before presenting new...

Previous studies indicate that higher tax burdens reduce incumbents’ popularity and re-election odds. The present paper offers a new test of this relation for German data. Our findings indicate that taxation indeed negatively affects German federal government approval ratings, in line with...

Conventional wisdom holds that war casualties depress incumbent popularity. We argue that the strength and even the direction of these effects is inherently context-dependent because the perception of casualties varies over time and space, affected by historical developments. While intuitive,...

For about 45 years, vote and popularity functions have been estimated for many countries indi- cating that voting intentions as well as actual votes are influenced by economic development. The economy is, of course, not the only and probably not always the most important factor, but there is no...