Electoral benchmarking, spill-over and contagion during the Great Recession

The level of interconnectedness among economic, political and social system is remarkable, and has become even more visible in the context of the Great Recession, with its evident domino effects. In this work we seek to distinguish analytically three types of mechanism through which those effects are transmitted from country to country: benchmarking, spill-over and contagion. We then try to operationalize them in the context of the theory of retrospective economic voting, by explaining the electoral behavior of citizens within the 28 EU member states during the economic crisis. Our results confirm that voters evaluate the national economic situation using external reference points, that the impact of the state of the economy spill-overs to highly globalized countries, but the hypothesis of direct contagion effects has been contradicted.