Not as bad as I thought’: economic attitudes and motivated reasoning in coalition governments

Georgios Kavetsos, Christian Krekel and George Melios

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Two prominent mechanisms have been advanced to explain the effects of election outcomes on economic attitudes/perceptions: partisan competence attribution, based on voters' genuine belief of an elected party's competence; and partisan motivated reasoning, where voters change their economic attitudes so as to remain consistent with their past behavior/view. To date, these two mechanisms have not been considered jointly. We draw on a unique, closely spaced, panel dataset around the 2013 German general elections to consider retrospective (past evaluations) and prospective (future expectations) attitudes about both one's personal economic situation and that of the national economy. We find no evidence for competence attribution; voters of the future coalition parties do not expect higher household incomes nor their job situation to improve. We find changes in retrospective attitudes about the national economy, explained by partisan motivated reasoning given a political alliance that was negated and depreciated throughout the pre‐election period. We discuss the implications these results have.

Keywords: elections; voting; attitudes; motivated reasoning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2025-04-07
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Published in Political Psychology, 7, April, 2025. ISSN: 0162-895X

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