Do people in new democracies that are undergoing market reforms turn against
these reforms when the economic adjustment is painful? The conventional wisdom
is that they will. According to "economic voting" models, citizens punish
elected governments for bad economic performance. The contributors to this
collection, in contrast, begin with the insight that citizens in new democracies
may have good reasons to depart from the predictions of economic voting. They
use state-of-the-art statistical techniques to analyze changes in aggregate
support levels, as reflected in public opinion polls, in response to changes in
inflation, unemployment, production, and wages. They find that public opinion of
reforms does not always conform to