Economic Voting in the 2006 Czech General Election

This paper investigates the occurrence and patterns of economic voting in the 2006 election for the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic. I construct multinomial logit models which specify the log odds of electoral support for a given political party as function of the regional economic conditions faced by the voter, controlling for political and socioeconomic factors, and estimate these with opinion-survey data. The results provide evidence of unemployment-based economic voting: other things equal, a 1 percentage point rise in the unemployment rate in the voter’s region increases their probability of voting for the leading incumbent socialist party on average by 0.8 percentage points and decreases their probability of voting for the Green party by 0.5 percentage points. Interestingly, these effects are driven by affluent voters. I conclude that the observed pattern of economic voting is most accurately described by the luxury goods voting model and, to some extent, the clientele hypothesis.