Economic voting under minority governments: The 2006 Canadian federal election

While empirical analysis suggests that economic voting is broadly applicable across industrialized democracies, most of those studies have focused on the United States and Western Europe. Canada has received relatively less attention in economic voting studies and when it has, the resulting evidence has been somewhat ambiguous. Canada offers a fascinating opportunity to examine whether the presence of a minority government affects the robustness of economic voting especially given that in 2006 Canadians replaced a minority Liberal government with a minority Conservative one. While most analyses of this election have focused on the role of successive scandals for contributing to the Liberals' defeat, little work has explicitly examined the role of economic factors in explaining the election's outcome. Thus, studying the 2006 Canadian federal election allows for both an examination of the importance of economics in Canadian electoral outcomes and voters' attribution of responsibility for the economy under minority government. In this paper, we test our central hypothesis that Canadians do engage in economic voting using public opinion data collected as part of the Canadian Election Survey (CES). We find that while Canadians did engage in retrospective sociotropic economic voting in 2006, prospective economic evaluations did not affect vote choice among the Canadian electorate.