The Consequences of Government Ideology and Taxation on Welfare Voting

Abstract

Welfare spending has grown considerably and is currently a core component of government expenditure in most advanced countries. Although a good deal of scholarship assumes that benefiting from welfare spending increases the likelihood of voting for the incumbent parties, the impact of general welfare spending on incumbent parties' electoral success has received scant attention. Moreover, we do not have much evidence regarding the conditions under which citizens reward incumbent parties for their generous welfare spending. This article expects that an increase in welfare spending has a positive effect on incumbent vote, but this effect is conditional on the ideology of government and levels of taxation. By examining 197 lower chamber elections in thirty-one OECD countries from approximately 1980 to 2013, this article finds that incumbent parties gain benefits for expansionary welfare spending. However, as the ideology of government moves closer to the right and as levels of taxation increase, the effects of welfare spending on incumbent parties' vote share become weaker. The conditional effects of government ideology and levels of taxation on welfare voting suggest that right-wing governments can be relatively free from their welfare performance and that high levels of taxation reduce the electoral benefits of generous welfare spending.