The level of interconnectedness among economic, political and social systems is remarkable, and has become even more visible in the context of the Great Recession, with its evident domino effects. In this paper, three types of mechanism through which those effects are transmitted from country to country are distiguished analytically: benchmarking, spillover, and contagion. Results confirm that voters evaluate the national economic situation using external reference points, that the impact of the state of the economy spills over to highly globalized countries, but the hypothesis of direct contagion effects is contradicted.