The Economic Roots of Cross-National Similarity in Voter Preferences

We argue that economic and political integration lead voters' political preferences toward cross-national convergence. Analyzing data on voter preferences across 30 European democracies from 1976 to 2022, we measure the similarity of preference distributions across each pair of state-years, documenting an average increase in similarity over time. We then model these similarities statistically and find that greater similarity and complementarity in economic production, and, co-participation in the European Union and the Eurozone are associated with increasingly similar voter preferences. The argument and analyses broaden our understanding of political implications of globalization and also provide a theoretical and empirical foundation for two growing literatures: one on the cross-national diffusion of parties' strategies and one on the political implications of macroeconomic stimuli such as trade shocks or banking crises.