Abstract
This article critically reviews the literature on the voting in response to governmental past performance (“retrospective voting”) and short-run economic conditions (“economic voting”). A state of the art of research into the qestion of both whether and how a person votes, based on both aggregate time-series analyses and cross-sectional analyses of individual survey responses, are discussed. Further progress in these areas, I argue, requires comparative perspective and extensive treatment of systemic and contextual variables in the model.
