Who misses the bare necessities? Material deprivation as an indicator for egotropic economic voting

There is strong empirical support for the theory of sociotropic economic voting, stating that voters decide which party to vote for based on their perception of the country’s economic situation. There is less evidence, however, for the occurrence of egotropic economic voting, where electoral preferences are determined by individual economic circumstances. We argue that this lack of support is partly caused by the way in which personal economic evaluations have been measured thus far. A subjective question on financial satisfaction is not necessarily related to real life circumstances, and therefore we rely on less biased indicators of material deprivation (MD). Using the 7th wave of the World Values Survey, we find that subjective perceptions of one’s financial situation are only weakly related to incumbent voting. Our new measure of MD, on the contrary, is significantly related to electoral support for the incumbent and therefore offers a better operationalization of egotropic economic voting.