Declining Quality of Life Costs Governments Elections: Review of 13 OECD Countries

I review studies of national elections from 13OECD countries over 30 years to examine theeffect of declining or increasing Quality ofLife (QOL) on citizens' voting behavior. Theresults are consistent with the theory thatcitizens hold the incumbent party responsiblefor increases or decreases in QOL during theirterm in office, and vote against an incumbentparty that fails to deliver improved QOL. Studies show that this ``responsibilityhypothesis'' holds not only for economicvariables such as GDP/capita, but for murderrates, violent crime rates, nutrition, andinequality. The platform and qualification ofcandidates also has an effect on voting, butthe macro-variables composing QOL occur priorto and act to shape the platform and strategyof candidates. These results hold importantimplications for constructing indexes of QOL,because researchers can use national votingbehavior to recover the weights that voters usein combining domains of QOL. By using theseweights from the `representative voter',researchers can create a unified index of QOLfor social reports.