The effects of quality of life on national elections: A multi-country analysis

This paper studies the effects of several Quality of Life (QOL) indicators on the outcomes of national elections. We test the hypothesis that declines in national QOL will have a negative effect on the voting support for the governing party in the next election. For each election since 1960 in thirt een countries, we use objective measures of QOL for the previous year to es timate the voting function by using a state-of-the-art technique called Sli ced Inverse Regression (Li, 1991). These objective measures include GDP per capita, food availability, inflation, crime rates, divorce rate, and perce nt of females in the labor force, among others. The estimated ``voting func tion'' is the best predictor of voters' behavior as a function of the chang es in QOL. The results show that changes in economic variables and food availability s ignificantly affect election outcomes. In addition, changes in crime rates were found to be nearly as important as economic variables in influencing t he election outcomes. This marks the first time that a non-economic indicat or has been shown to affect elections. In contrast, measures of satisfactio n with family life, such as divorce, infant mortality, and percent females in the workforce, show no effect on voting behavior, probably because voter s do not hold their governments responsible for family affairs.