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.