Previous research has established that taxation may entail significant electoral costs to politicians. This literature, however, focuses exclusively on the effect of the tax burden. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that both the level of the tax burden and the change in the tax structure...

This paper investigates social preferences towards unemployment and inflation in the United States. Estimating a popularity function with monthly data for the recent Obama administration, we find that U.S. voters react strongly to both unemployment and inflation. However, reducing unemployment...

This is one of the first studies to estimate a popularity function at the micro-level. Using German micro-level data (GGSS/ALLBUS) for the years 1991, 1992, 1998, and 2008, we show that a positive assessment of the economy significantly improves government popularity while negative evaluations...

Previous studies indicate that higher tax burdens reduce incumbents’ popularity and re-election odds. The present paper offers a new test of this relation for German data. Our findings indicate that taxation indeed negatively affects German federal government approval ratings, in line with...

Conventional wisdom holds that war casualties depress incumbent popularity. We argue that the strength and even the direction of these effects is inherently context-dependent because the perception of casualties varies over time and space, affected by historical developments. While intuitive,...