The role of voters’ economic evaluations in February 2013 presidential elections in the Republic of Cyprus

The communist AKEL (Ανορθωτικό Κόμμα Εργαζόμενου Λαού) party governed the Republic of Cyprus from February 2008 to February 2013. During this period, AKEL had to deal with grave economic problems. This article uses the European Elections Study (2009) data and presents a statistical model that explains up to 70 per cent of the variance. We show that retrospective sociotropic evaluation of the economy by the Greek Cypriots has a significant effect on their intention to vote or not for the incumbent party. On the basis of this result, one may argue that the considerable amount of votes lost by AKEL in February 2013 presidential elections could be mainly because of the deteriorating economic situation since the party took office in February 2008.