Unemployment and economic voting

A significant association between the vote and one or more of the issues of real income, inflation, interest rates and unemployment, has conventionally been taken as evidence that voters are economically rational. However, contrary to the assumption that unemployment is an unambiguous measure of the economy, this paper argues that the meaning of unemployment is not well understood. Factor analysis indicates that voters weight unemployment as a social, as well as an economic, issue. This suggests that although an association between unemployment and the vote may indicate that voters are rational, it cannot indicate that they are necessarily economically rational. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.