Francesco ZucchiniGuilhem CassanCarbonnelle, AntoineAntoineCarbonnelle2025-05-142025-05-142025-05-142024https://hdl.handle.net/2078.2/39417Scholars' opinions differ on the extent to which the welfare state affects economic voting. While some support a connection between the structure of the welfare state and the weight of the economic vote, others are skeptical of these findings and claim that the welfare state does not affect the voting behavior. The objective of this work is to determine which of these two lines of thought is correct. This study therefore attempts to assess the extent to which the welfare state influences the economic vote using 74 national elections across 42 democratic, industrialized countries over a period of ten years (2011-2021). It first analyzes the variation of the economic vote based on governmental social spending during the election year, and second, based on the welfare regime the country belongs to. As methodology, this study employs a two-stage approach. In the first stage it determines the weight of the economic vote. This first stage employs logistic regression models to individual-level data collected by the CSES project. In the second stage, the study analyzes, through OLS regression models, the degree to which the economic vote varies depending on governmental social expenditures and the welfare regime. On the one hand, the findings indicate that the level of public expenditures in social domains does not affect the weight of the economic vote. However, on the other hand, the results reveal that the weight of the economic vote tends to range higher in countries with socio-democratic and conservative-corporatist welfare regimes than in countries with liberal welfare regimes. This study therefore indicates that the economic vote does not fluctuate with the level of social spending, but that it does fluctuate with the welfare regime, and thus with the structure of the welfare state.Economic VotingPolitical EconomyWelfare StateVoting Behaviortext::thesis::master thesisthesis:46859