Recent work from the American and British context shows that the relationship between performance evaluations and incumbent support is largely endogenous. More specifically, these studies suggest that the conventional wisdom stemming from the retrospective voting model misrepresents the relationship between performance perceptions and the vote as voters consistently and robustly update their economic evaluations to their political preferences rather than vice versa. This evidence of the political conditioning of economic perceptions is promising, yet remains incomplete. It is solely based on elections within countries using plurality electoral systems in which mainly two viable parties compete and executive power is concentrated within one majority party. As such, one could argue that these countries constitute the ‘most likely’ cases. This study extends existing work on the political conditioning of economic perceptions by using panel data from German Federal elections between 2002 and 2009. In Germany, executive power is shared among coalition partners, and voters are presented with a multitude of viable parties competing for their vote. We theoretically argue and empirically substantiate that the more ambiguous lines of policy responsibility in Germany weakens the political conditioning of economic perceptions as in institutionally complex settings only highly sophisticated voters are able to rationally update their economic evaluations to their party preference. Overall, this study provides an important contribution to the work on retrospective voting and democratic accountability more generally.
