Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 399–426 www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud The political context of issue-priority voting: coalitions and economic voting in the Netherlands, 1970–1999  Han Dorussen a,* , Michaell Taylor b a Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway b Economics Research Group, Reis.com, 5 West 37th Street, New York City, NY 10018, USA Abstract Issue-priority models are the principal alternatives to reward–punishment or incumbency- oriented models of the political economy of party support. A focus on the political context clariﬁes some conceptual difﬁculties with issue-priority voting. We emphasize the implications of multi-party system and coalition government. A case study is presented on how economic factors have affected party popularity in the Netherlands between 1970 and 1999. Coalitions have not rendered issue-priority voting infeasible because (1) voters possess necessary basic information, (2) they have indentiﬁable perceptions about party issue priority, and (3) they have reasonable expectations about the relation between electoral outcomes and possible coalitions. Survey data and time-series analyses provide support for the idea that issue-priority voting is conditional on perceptions of competency and coalition structure.  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Economic voting; Issue priority; Political sophistication; Time-series data  Equal authorship, names in alphabetical order. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Meeting of the Public Choice Society, New Orleans, USA, 1998 and the ECPR Joint Meeting of Work- shop, Mannheim, Germany, 1999. We thank participants at those conferences for helpful comments. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +47-73-590268; fax: +47-73-591564. E-mail addresses: han.dorussen@svt.ntnu.no (H. Dorussen), michaell.taylor@reis.com (M. Taylor). 0261-3794/01/$ - see front matter  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0261-3794(00)00026-3