Patrimonial Economic Voting: Legislative Elections in France

Patrimonial economic voting has been neglected in favour of classical economic voting studies. This assertion holds less, however, with French election investigations, where the neglect is relative rather than absolute. Whereas classical economic voting holds the economy to be a valence issue, patrimonial economic voting regards the economy as a positional issue. Voters who own more property, in particular high-risk assets, are held to be more right-wing in their political preferences. This patrimonial effect shows itself to be statistically and substantively strong in one of the few election data-sets with sufficient measures available – surveys on the National Assembly contests of 1978, 1988, 2002. The electoral effect exceeds that from the traditional ‘heavy variables’ of class and income. Moreover, further work might show its impact comparable to that of classic sociotropic retrospective evaluations of the national economy. Certainly a case can be made for further study of patrimonial economic voting, as compared to classical economic voting.     

Economic voting theory: Testing new dimensions

Classical economic voting theory has received considerable empirical support. Voters reward the incumbent for good times, punish it for bad. But the success of this paradigm, which views the economy as strictly a valence issue, has crowded out testing of other theoretical dimensions. In particular, positional and patrimonial economic voting have hardly been examined. The former concerns the different preferences voters have on economic policy issues, such as progressive taxation. The latter concerns the place of voters in the economic structure itself, not merely as members of a social class but as actual property owners. Through analysis of a special battery of economic items, from a 2008 US presidential election survey, we demonstrate that the economy was important to voters in three ways: valence, position, and patrimony. Taken together, these dimensions go far as an explanation of vote choice, at least with respect to the short-term forces acting on this political behavior.     

The impact of economic assets on party choice in Australia

While there is general agreement that economic voting matters, there is less agreement on how to measure it. This paper examines the most recent conceptualization of economic voting: the ownership of economic assets or “patrimonial” voting. Using the 2016 Australian Election Study survey, we show that property ownership and, especially, share ownership were significant influences on party choice. By contrast, ownership of an investment property or a personal superannuation fund had no significant effect on the vote. We explain this finding through the specific policies that the parties advanced in the 2016 campaign. While Labor parted ways from the Coalition by proposing radical changes to the tax treatment of investment properties but with no retrospectivity, the parties had similar positions on the tax treatment of superannuation. The findings emphasize how party policies can shape the electoral significance of asset ownership.     

First-time boost beats experience: The effect of past eligibility on turnout

Recent findings from the US indicate a clear positive causal effect of past eligibility on voting in subsequent elections. Based on individual-level register data from four elections held in Denmark and Finland, we find that past eligibility either decreases voting propensity or has a zero effect among young voters. The hype associated with the first elections thus appears to cancel out the habit among young adults in countries where the institutional barriers against voting are weak. Moreover, differences across the types of elections can be noted. The negative effect of past eligibility is strongest in elections characterized by low saliency, implying that high-salient elections mobilize all voters equally and therefore narrow the gap between first and second-time eligible voters.     

Who's the chef? Economic voting under a dual executive

Abstract. Standard economic voting models assume a dominant locus of policy responsibility, a single chief executive whose powers are fixed by certain inviolate institutional rules. The president-centred US system serves as the paradigm here. However, economic voting may occur under a dual executive, whose powers change in response to the institutional rules themselves. France represents this second scenario. There are two executives, the President and the Prime Minister. Under conditions of cohabitation, with a partisan division of the power between the two offices, economic voting becomes more sophisticated. According to data from the 1993–1995 cohabitation, voters perceived that the Prime Minister, not the President, was responsible for the economy. Therefore, in the 1995 presidential contest, they directed their economic evaluations at the Gaullist party of the Prime Minister, not the Socialist party of the President.     

Social identity and coethnic voting in the Middle East: Experimental evidence from Qatar

What explains widespread coethnic voting in the Middle East? The prevailing understanding revolves around clientelism: the view that MENA citizens support coethnic parties and candidates in order to most easily or effectively extract resources from the patrimonial state. Previous research has thus neglected non-economic explanations of ethnic-based preferences and outcomes in MENA elections, including social biases long identified in other settings. This study presents findings from a conjoint survey experiment in Qatar, where symbolic elections lack distributional implications. Consistent with expectations derived from social identity theory, results reveal strong favoritism of cosectarian candidates, whereas objective candidate qualifications do not affect voter preferences. Bias is especially strong in a policy domain – promoting religious values – that prompts respondents to consider the candidate’s ethnic identity. Findings offer clear evidence that ethnic-based voting in Qatar and likely elsewhere is not merely epiphenomenal but can reflect actual preferences for members of social in-groups.     

Past is still present: Micro-level comparisons of conventional vs. transitional economic voting in three Polish elections

Using survey data from three Polish parliamentary elections, we provide the first systematic micro-level test contrasting a standard incumbency-based model of economic voting with a transitional economic voting model in the post-communist context. To do so, we introduce a novel temporal component to micro-level studies of economic voting that supplements standard short-term retrospective economic evaluations (e.g., “do you feel the economy has improved in the past 12 months?”) with longer “transitional” retrospective economic evaluations (e.g., “do you feel the economy has improved since the collapse of communism?”). Our analyses reveal a nuanced picture suggesting multiple paths for economic influences on voting in Poland. We find evidence consistent with the standard incumbency-based approach, but only for the specific set of evaluations to which the theory is most appropriately applied: short-term retrospective economic evaluations and the vote for incumbent parties. By contrast, the transitional model is strongly supported by evidence that evaluations of changes in economic conditions since the collapse of communism (“long-term economic evaluations”) have an effect on the vote for a range of parties. We demonstrate as well that these results are robust to model specification and generational effects.     

The economy,corruption, and the vote: Evidence from experiments in Sweden and Moldova

How does corruption affect voting behavior when economic conditions are poor? Using a novel experimental design and two original survey experiments, we offer four important conclusions. First, in a low corruption country (Sweden), voters react negatively to corruption regardless of the state of the economy. Second, in a high corruption country (Moldova), voters react negatively to corruption only when the state of the economy is also poor; when economic conditions are good, corruption is less important. Third, respondents in Sweden react more strongly to corruption stimuli than respondents in Moldova. Finally, in the low corruption country, sociotropic corruption voting (or voting based on corruption among political leaders) is relatively more important, whereas in our high corruption country, pocketbook corruption voting (or voting based on one's own personal experience with corruption, i.e., being asked to pay bribes) is equally prevalent. Our findings are consistent with multiple stable corruption equilibria, as well as with a world where voters are more responsive to corruption signals more common in their environment.     

Welfare Dualism in Two Scandinavian Welfare States: Public Opinion and Party Politics

Recent research on the legitimacy of the welfare state has pointed to a potential negative impact of immigration. While much of this research has been concerned with a possible weakening of the general support for economic redistribution, this article analyses popular support for the introduction of a two-tier (dualist) welfare system, and focuses on the interplay between public opinion and party competition. It uses survey data from Denmark and Norway: two similar welfare states where elite politics on migration and welfare dualism has been markedly different over the last decade. It finds that the level and structure of popular support for welfare dualism are fairly similar in the two countries, but that attitudes toward dualism have a stronger impact on left–right voting in Denmark where the politics of welfare dualism has been actively advocated by the populist right party and pursued by a right-wing coalition government.     

Endogenous economic voting: evidence from the 1997 British election

Using panel surveys conducted in Great Britain before and after the 1997 general election, we examine the relationship between voting behavior and post-election economic perceptions. Drawing on psychological theories of attitude formation, we argue that those who voted for Labour and the Liberal Democrats perceived the past state of the British economy under the Tory government more negatively than they had prior to casting their ballot in the 1997 election. Similarly, we posit that Labour supporters would view the future state of the national economy under Labour more positively than they had before the election. This indicates that, contrary to many assumptions in the economic voting literature, voting behavior influences evaluations of the economy as voters seek to reduce inconsistencies between their vote choice and evaluations of the economy by bringing their attitudes in line with the vote they cast in the election. It also means that voters’ post-election economic perceptions are, at least in part, influenced by and thus endogenous to their vote choice. This finding has two major implications: first, cross-sectional models of economic voting are likely to overestimate the effect of economic perceptions on the vote. Second, the endogeneity of economic perceptions may compromise the quality of economic voting as a mechanism for democratic accountability.     

Using state-level simulations in a political economy model of US trade policy

Most analyses of US congressional votes on trade policy identify political and economic factors, and general economic conditions as significant factors. In this paper we examine whether simulated state-level impacts of trade policy changes obtained from an applied general equilibrium model explain recent US Senate votes on trade bills. We find that simulated gross state product effects are good predictors of recent trade-policy votes. Our model-based measures of trade sensitivity perform slightly better in statistical terms than the more traditional economic measures. For the Senate as a whole, import considerations have a larger impact on senate voting than export considerations.     

The ecological correlates of right-wing extremism in Western Europe

Abstract This study traces the evolution of right–wing extremism, conceptualized as latent electoral support for extreme right–wing parties (i.e., vote intention), in six Western European countries (i.e., Belgium, France, the Netherlands, West Germany, Denmark, and Italy) between 1984 and 1993. Employing a pooled time–series cross–sectional research design, the author examines the relative strength of three popular explanations of contemporary rightwing extremism: the impact of economic conditions (unemployment and inflation), social developments (immigration), and political trends (public's dissatisfaction with the political regime). Evidence is presented in support of the last two explanations. Rising levels of immigration and public dissatisfaction with the political regime significantly facilitate right–wing extremism. Contrary to the initial hypothesis however, results suggest that a declining national economy (unemployment in particular) diminishes the electoral appeal of extreme right–wing parties.     

The ecological correlates of right–wing extremism in Western Europe

This study traces the evolution of right–wing extremism, conceptualized as latent electoral support for extreme right–wing parties (i.e., vote intention), in six Western European countries (i.e., Belgium, France, the Netherlands, West Germany, Denmark, and Italy) between 1984 and 1993. Employing a pooled time–series cross–sectional research design, the author examines the relative strength of three popular explanations of contemporary rightwing extremism: the impact of economic conditions (unemployment and inflation), social developments (immigration), and political trends (public's dissatisfaction with the political regime). Evidence is presented in support of the last two explanations. Rising levels of immigration and public dissatisfaction with the political regime significantly facilitate right–wing extremism. Contrary to the initial hypothesis however, results suggest that a declining national economy (unemployment in particular) diminishes the electoral appeal of extreme right–wing parties.     

Voting Islamist or voting secular? An empirical analysis of voting outcomes in Egypt’s “Arab Spring”

This paper studies empirically the voting outcomes of Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success at the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist versus secular voting. We identify two dimensions that affect voting outcomes at the constituency level: socioeconomic profile and the electoral institutional framework. Our results show that education is negatively associated with Islamist voting. Interestingly, we find significant evidence suggesting that higher poverty levels are associated with a lower vote share for Islamist parties. Exploiting the sequential voting setup, we show that later voting stages have not resulted in stronger support for the already winning Islamist parties (i.e., there is no bandwagon effect).     

Economic Voting and Multilevel Governance: A Comparative Individual-Level Analysis

An important component of incumbent support is the reward/punishment calculus of economic voting. Previous work has shown that "clarity of responsibility" within the central state government conditions national economic effects on incumbent vote choice: where clarity is high (low), economic effects are greater (less). This article advances the "clarity of responsibility" argument by considering the effect of multilevel governance on economic voting. In institutional contexts of multilevel governance, the process of correctly assigning responsibility for economic outcomes can be difficult. This article tests the proposition that multilevel governance mutes effects of national economic conditions by undermining responsibility linkages to the national government. Individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 1 are used to test this proposition. Results demonstrate that economic voting is weakest in countries where multilevel governance is most prominent. Findings are discussed in light of the contribution to the economic voting literature and the potential implications of multilevel governance.     

Class voting and left voting in Scandinavia

Abstract. This article examines the effects of different definitions of the working class on the measurement of class voting and left voting in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. First, the similarities and differences in how the working class has been operationalized in the three countries are summarized. To determine the effects of different operationalizations, Swedish election survey data are recoded to conform more closely to the classification procedures used in Danish and Norwegian studies. The analysis shows that if a similar operationalization is used, the level of left voting in both the Swedish working and middle classes increases and the Alford index of class voting declines. Class voting and left voting in the younger and older generations and among women and men are also discussed. Dissimilar patterns of class voting and left voting among women in the three countries are largely a product of different classification schemes. The concluding discussion points to a number of problems in using the Alford index as a summary statistic in cross-national comparisons.     

Economics and the Left Party Vote in Scandinavia: A Cross-National Analysis

While the literature on economic voting is vast, relatively little is known about how the economy affects party vote shares in Scandinavia per se. This article argues that left of center parties rather than incumbent governments per se bear the brunt of economic judgments at the voting booth. In large part this is due to these parties' preeminent role in establishing and maintaining the institutional welfare systems of these countries. We examine this hypothesis using pooled time-series data for Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden from 1960 to 1991.     

Determinants of State Economic Perceptions

Despite a greatly increased emphasis on state economic development, citizens' perceptions of state economic conditions have been infrequently studied, leaving a serious question as to how well citizens distinguish between national and state economic performance. We investigate the sources of state economic perceptions using data from 1990 Voter Research and Surveys exit polls of 23 states along with measures of state economic conditions. We find strong support for the proposition that perceptions of state and national economies are distinct phenomena. We also find that state economic perceptions are well grounded in economic reality—that is, in the conditions of the state economy. Finally, we show that state economic perceptions are based on a variety of indicators, including measures that have not heretofore been included in models of economic voting.     

Does survey mode matter for studying electoral behaviour? Evidence from the 2009 German Longitudinal Election Study

Online surveys are becoming increasingly popular in the social sciences, particularly in electoral research. However, several studies have shown that participants who take part in online surveys differ significantly from those in other surveys. Still, since electoral research aims primarily at explaining voting behaviour (i.e., looks at slopes and intercepts in statistical model output), online surveys are deemed to be useful tools if models based on this data source arrive at similar conclusions than models based e.g. on random-sample face-to-face or telephone surveys. This paper analyses these relationships by comparing models of voting behaviour based on data from various survey modes with different sample selections conducted by the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) 2009. The results indicate that the data quality of the different survey types is comparable; online surveys are thus useful for electoral research.     

China's rural reform: the state and peasantry in constructing a macro-rationality

As a critique of the popular perspective on China's rural reform centered on microinstitutional problems of collective farming such as work incentive and monitoring, this paper places an alternative emphasis on the distinct organizational characteristics of the peasant family in production, distribution, and welfare. What the Chinese state saw in family-based peasantry was not a typical market-oriented private economy operating mainly in pursuit of short term profits, but a multipurpose, morally governed unit in which the rural population maintains stable work relations, pursues diverse entrepreneurial activities, and satisfies basic subsistence needs; i.e., a organizational unit which could take over most of the social and economic functions of the pre-reform collective. In a sense, China's rural decollectivization has been a process of deceptively transferring the burden of absorbing and supporting the huge rural surplus labor to individual peasant families for whose economic activities the state is not directly responsible.