IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/pscirm/v8y2020i4p795-802_14.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The electoral cycle effect in parliamentary democracies

Author

Listed:
  • Müller, Stefan
  • Louwerse, Tom

Abstract

Does government party support decline in a monotonic fashion throughout the legislative cycle or do we observe a u-shaped “electoral cycle effect”? Moving beyond the study of midterm election results, this is the first comparative study to assess the cyclical pulse of government party support in parliamentary democracies based on voting intention polls from 171 cycles in 22 countries. On average, government parties lose support during the first half of the electoral cycle, but at most partially recover from their initial losses. Under single-party government and when prime ministers control cabinet dissolution, support tends to follow the previously assumed u-shaped pattern more strongly. Finally, we find that government parties hardly recover from early losses since the 2000s.

Suggested Citation

  • Müller, Stefan & Louwerse, Tom, 2020. "The electoral cycle effect in parliamentary democracies," Political Science Research and Methods, Cambridge University Press, vol. 8(4), pages 795-802, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:pscirm:v:8:y:2020:i:4:p:795-802_14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S204984701800047X/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:pscirm:v:8:y:2020:i:4:p:795-802_14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/ram .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.