A fresh way to look at presidential elections and their impact on economic growth (from US data, though). Notice the strong positive correlation between the percentage vote share of the incumbent party (Republican or Democrat) and average economic growth for the past four years.
This implies that the voter share of the incumbent party has a seemingly significant impact on the way the economy is run. This makes sense, because a bigger share implies higher confidence in the incumbent party’s legitimacy, leading to political stability, and less adverse political shocks to the economy.
The Philippines, however, is a different case. Here we have a multiparty system, a shift from our formerly two-party system (Nacionalista and Liberal). A multiparty system complicates things a bit because it creates many problems, including the possibility of a minority president arising from a minority party.Consider the case of a 5-party system, with vote shares as follows: 30%, 25%, 20%, 15%, 10%. A two-party system, meanwhile, has voter shares of 75%, 25%, respectively.
- Clearly, the party with a 75% share wins, and since it gets a considerable share of the votes, its legitimacy is rarely questioned.
- But in the case of the 5-party system, the winner only amasses 30% of the votes, meaning that the other 70% didn’t really want that party to win. This creates legitimacy problems and constant protests that may pose threats to economic stability and integrity.
Econologue 