Punishing Voters and Obedient Politicians: Evidence from then Norwegian Citizens Panel and the Panel of Elected Representatives in Norway

Our paper would be well suited for Section 2 of the panel, i.e., Political Actor’s behaviour in Sub-National Politics Economic voting relays on three assumptions: First, voters use assessment of regional and national economy to reward or punish regional/national incumbent governments at the time of elections. Second, representatives at each level are aware that voters hold them accountable, and third they act accordingly to maximize re-elections. Using two unique panel datasets, the Norwegian Citizens Panel and the Panel of Elected Representatives in Norway, our study confirms that at the first step, perceptions of the economy are associated with vote for or against the incumbent party. Secondly, we show that voters are motivated by sanctioning politicians, therefore keeping them accountable for the governing period. Thirdly, we show that representatives who perceive that their voters are motivated by sanctioning voting, are less inclined to have incongruent positions. We test this incongruence by using preference for income redistribution at the time of elections and agreeing to increase taxes several years after the elections. In addition, political representatives have a lower inclination to deviate from their own party position if they think voters are going to sanction their political behavior. Finally, we also show that these assumptions hold when voters asses the regional instead of the national economy, where about one third of the voters assess the regional economy as better or worst then the national economy. In the regions where the regional economy is evaluated as worst then the national, we observe higher level of sanctioning voting, which is noted by politicians who subsequently have more congruent positions to the one they held at time of elections. These findings are even more remarkable considering that we find strong evidence of the above assumptions in a case such as Norway, a country with high level of agreement regarding the taxation policies and where the regional economic differences are relatively small. Our study not only confirms the economic voting model exist in multilevel context, but also reveals that economic voting plays out differently across the statewide territory.