Politics and Unemployment in Industrialized Democracies

This paper provides an empirical appraisal of the influence ofpolitics on the evolution of unemployment rates in 13industrialized democracies (12 European Union countries andthe U.S.) from 1960 to 1999. We conduct new tests ofopportunistic and partisan business cycle models, using richerdata and more general specifications than previous studies. Incontrast to most previous studies, we pay particular attentionto the importance of labor market structure in conditioningthe influence of politics on unemployment. We also investigatethe relationship between political stability and economicstability. The results suggest the existence of partisan effects, withhigher unemployment rates prevailing under ``right'' partiesthan ``left'' parties. There is more support for ``rational''partisan models that embody transient partisan impacts thanfor models with permanent effects. We find evidence that unionpower is associated with higher average unemployment rates,but that centralized bargaining institutions tend to lowerunemployment rates. The evidence also suggests that morefragmented coalition governments are associated with higherunemployment rates than single party governments.     

Who should be chef? The dynamics of valence evaluations across income groups during economic crises

In this paper, we investigate partisan rationalization in valence politics by trying to better specify the direct and indirect effects of the economy on government support. To do so, we examine how income levels moderate the influence of objective economic conditions on perceptions of which party is the best manager of the economy during a period of economic crisis, 2004–2010, in the United Kingdom. We find that low-income voters are more responsive in their assessments of the incumbent Labour government based on unemployment, as are high-income voters in terms of inflation. In addition, high-income voters tend to behave in a manner consistent with partisan rationalization, while low-income voters do not. These conclusions offer important implications for the effectiveness of electoral control of government policy, as well as the quality of representation.     

Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries

We develop a model of intraparty candidate selection under partisan electoral competition and voter uncertainty. Candidates for office belong to parties, which are factions of ideologically similar candidates. Each party’s candidate for a general election can be selected either by a “centralized” mechanism that effectively randomizes over possible candidates or by voters in a primary election. The electorate cares about ideology and valence, and both primary and general elections may reveal candidate valences. Our main theoretical result is that while primaries raise the expected quality of a party’s candidates, they may hurt the ex ante preferred party in a competitive electorate by increasing the chances of revealing the opposing party’s candidates as superior. Thus, primaries are adopted in relatively extreme districts where a clear favorite party exists. An empirical analysis of the adoption of direct primaries and the competitiveness of primary elections across U.S. states supports these predictions.     

Economic Outcomes and Voting Behaviour in a Multi-Party System: An Application to the Netherlands

This paper is an empirical study to the effects of economic outcomes on party choice for the Netherlands. In the first part of the paper we employ a multinomial logit model to examine the links between voters' characteristics and party choice. The results suggest that there are long-run movements in party choice which are unlikely be the result of changing economic outcomes. In the second part, we use time series analysis to determine the effects of economic conditions on short-run and medium-run movements in votes shares. The estimations results provide support for the responsibility hypothesis and for the predictions of the partisan voter model that left-wing (right-wing) parties benefit (suffer) from favourable economic growth prospects.     

Ecologies of Unease: Geographic Context and National Economic Evaluations

Assessment of the nation??s economic performance has been repeatedly linked to voters?? decision-making in U.S. presidential elections. Here we inquire as to where those economic evaluations originate. One possibility in the politicized environment of a major campaign is that they are partisan determinations and do not reflect actual economic circumstances. Another possibility is that these judgments arise from close attention to news media, which is presumably highlighting national economic conditions as a facet of campaign coverage. Still a third explanation is that voters derive their national economic evaluations from living out their lives in particular localities which may or may not be experiencing the conditions that affect the nation as a whole. Drawing upon data from the 2008 presidential election, we find that varying local conditions do shape the economic evaluations of political independents. Moreover, unemployment is not the only salient factor, as fuel prices and foreclosures also figured prominently. Local economic factors, what we call geotropic considerations, shape national economic evaluations especially for those who aren??t making these judgments on simple partisan grounds.     

Pain tolerance: Economic voting in the Czech Republic

Several theoretical explanations have been proposed to explain the mixed evidence of economic voting in post-communist countries. Using aggregate-level data, this article relaxes the assumption of parameter constancy and employs rolling regression analysis to track fluctuations in parameters over time. The results contradict the existing theories of economic voting in postcommunist countries. As an alternative explanation, the article suggest that voters have a level of pain tolerance below which the economy will not play a role in evaluations of the government; voters will use economic indicators to punish and reward incumbent government only if the economic indicators exceed their pain tolerance. For example, in the Czech Republic, voters will not start punishing the incumbent party until inflation climbs above 13.44%. However, Czech voters are less tolerant of unemployment and will punish the incumbent when unemployment exceeds 8.82%.     

A model of candidate location with endogenous valence

This work gives a theoretical explanation for the increase in campaign spending and party polarization in U.S. politics. I assume that the effectiveness of persuasive advertising, and of costly valence campaigning in general, positively depends on the share of nonpartisan voters. A decline in the number of partisan voters in a constituency results in greater campaign spending by the candidates. If the voters are risk-averse, the candidates who maximize their expected office rents minus the cost of campaigning will choose divergent policy platforms strategically in order to reduce the costs of subsequent campaign spending. The degree of policy divergence positively depends on the share of nonpartisan voters for a broad class of voter disutility and candidate cost of valence functions.     

The valence gap: Economic cycles,perceptions of competence,and the party system

How does the economic cycle matter for political parties and party systems? This article presents a unified theory connecting economic cycles to party behavior and to party system fragmentation. We argue that a key but poorly studied determinant of party system performance is the difference in perceived competence among parties. The narrowing of differences in parties' valence stock, or the ‘valence gap’, has the effect of increasing the weight voters assign to parties' ideological positions and, in turn, increases the number of parties in the system. Analyses of German public opinion from 1990 to 2007 and of cross-sectional analysis of party valence characteristics from nine countries provides evidence in support of our claims. Overall, study findings show how economic growth and decline work through differences in parties' valence to shape the behavior of party systems.     

The Impact of Economic Performance on Electoral Support in Sweden, 1967–1978*

This article investigates the impact of macroeconomic conditions on aggregate political support for governing parties in Sweden over the period 1967–1978. After reviewing survey evidence on the relative salience of economic and fiscal issues to the Swedish electorate, a novel, dynamic model of political support is presented. The model incorporates the ideas that voters evaluate economic performance relatively rather than absolutely, and that governments' mass political support is based on their cumulative performance records. The empirical results supply estimates of the impact of unemployment, inflation, the real income growth rate and the income effects of direct tax and transfer policies on political support. The evidence suggests that the responses of political support to reasonable movements in macroeconomic conditions are large enough to give economic management a pivotal role in electoral shifts.     

Knowing your sources: Partisan media and voters’ perceptions of the economy

This paper explains how media systems influence the extent to which partisanship colors voters’ perceptions of the economy (i.e., the strength of the partisan screen). It builds upon research on individual-level biases in economic perceptions, seeking to extend existing work by considering how the availability of partisan media for a given party affect such biases. The implication of this is that the greater the availability of media sources favorable to a party, the stronger the partisan screen for its partisans. This follows from several mechanisms including selective acceptance of messages, selective exposure to partisan sources, and incidental exposure to partisan sources. Each of these suggests that differences in the availability of partisan media across parties leads to corresponding differences in the extent of partisan bias for partisans of these parties. I test this Hypothesis in 14 European countries over four time-periods using data built from expert surveys on media characteristics.     

Performance pressure: Patterns of partisanship and the economic vote

Numerous studies have demonstrated a weakening identification of voters with political parties in Western Europe over the last three decades. It is argued here that the growing proportion of voters with weak or no party affinities has strong implications for economic voting. When the proportion of voters with partisan affinities is low, the effect of economic performance on election outcomes is strong; when partisans proliferate, economic conditions matter less. Employing Eurobarometer data for eight European countries from 1976 to 1992, this inverse association between partisanship and the economic vote is demonstrated. This finding implies a growing effect for the objective economy on the vote in Europe. It helps explain an important puzzle in the economic voting literature: Weak results in aggregate level cross‐national studies of economic voting may be attributable to characteristics of the electorate, not just to the characteristics of government.     

Misleading ballot position cue: Party voting in Korea's nonpartisan local elections

In this study, I present evidence that ballot order can provide a misleading cue to voters. In South Korea, nonpartisan municipal legislative elections were held concurrently with other partisan local elections until 2002. The ballot order of the candidates running in nonpartisan elections was randomly determined, whereas it was determined according to a party's number of seats in the national legislature for candidates running in partisan elections. Therefore, if voters are fully informed, the vote share for the candidate listed first in the nonpartisan ballot should not be correlated with the vote share for the party listed first on the partisan ballot. However, I find that the vote share for a first-listed candidate increases when the first-listed party's vote share increases. I also find that the presence of an incumbent does not significantly reduce the degree to which voters mistakenly use ballot position as a party cue.     

How partisan affect shapes citizens' perception of the political world

We explore how partisan affect shapes citizens' views of party ideology and political competition. We argue that voters' affective ties to parties (both positive and negative) lead them to perceive the ideological positions of those parties as more extreme. Further, when voters are "affectively polarized," i.e., they strongly like some parties and dislike others, they are more likely to view politics as high stakes competition, where ideological polarization is rampant, participation is crucial, and electoral outcomes are highly consequential. Using cross-national survey data covering 43 elections in 34 countries, we show that partisan affect indeed impacts perceptions of party ideology and that affective polarization alters beliefs about the nature of political competition.     

Information and party voting in “semipartisan” judicial elections

Research on the relationship between the quantity of information that voters possess and their party voting behavior in partisan elections has produced mixed and confusing empirical results. In an effort to provide a broader perspective, this paper explores that relationship in nonpartisan elections contested by candidates of opposing parties. The paper analyzes survey data on two 1984 contests for seats on the Ohio Supreme Court, using the presidential race for comparison. Despite a highly partisan campaign, party defections by voters were far more common in the supreme court races than in the presidential race, reflecting the importance of party designations on the ballot as a source of information on candidates' party affiliations. At the individual level, levels of information had differing effects in the two supreme court races and for Democratic and Republican voters; this finding suggests that the impact of imformation levels on voters' choices is conditioned by the content of information in particular campaigns.     

Partisan Differences in Swedish Macroeconomic Policy

The purpose of this paper is to trace partisan differencesamong Swedish governments during the period 1958-2000. According tothe Partisan Theory of macroeconomic policy left-wing governmentsare relatively more concerned with the performance of the realside of the economy (real output and unemployment) as compared toright-wing governments, that place a higher weight on the nominalvariables (inflation). Left-wing governments would therefore pursue moreexpansionary aggregate demand policy, and thereby be willingto risk a higher inflation, in order to improve real economicperformance. In this paper we apply the model developed in Hibbs (1994) onSwedish data. Our empirical results support the partisan theory,showing that, ceteris paribus, aggregate demand policy under left-winggovernments is relatively more expansionary than under right-wing governments, even if the expansionary policysometimes leads to higher inflation.     

The Moderating Effect of Debates on Political Attitudes

In theory, candidate debates can influence voters by providing information about candidates' quality and policy positions. However, there is limited evidence about whether and why debates influence voters in new democracies. We use a field experiment on parliamentary debates during Ghana's 2016 elections to show that debates improve voters' evaluations of candidates. Debates have the strongest effect on partisan voters, who become more favorable toward and more likely to vote for opponent-party candidates and less likely to vote for co-partisans. Experimental and unique observational data capturing participants' second-by-second reactions to the debates show that policy information was the most important causal mechanism driving partisan moderation, especially among strong partisans. A follow-up survey shows that these effects persist in electorally competitive communities, whereas they dissipate in party strongholds. Policy-centered debates have the potential to reduce partisan polarization in new democracies, but the local political context conditions the persistence of these effects.     

The Determinants of Vote Intentions in Portugal

This paper offers new insights on theinteractions between economics and politicsin Portugal. We use two unexplored datasets consisting of monthly polls on voteintentions for the main political partiesin Portugal and responses to a consumersurvey containing a battery of questions oneconomic evaluations. The analysis coversthe interval from 1986 to 2001. We findthat: (1) right-wing governments arepenalized for higher inflation while theleft-wing ones are not, (2) left-winggovernments are more penalized forincreases in the unemployment rate; (3)voters base their evaluations ofincumbents' performances on perceptions ofpast and current economic conditions,rather than on expected future economicoutcomes.     

Electoral Uncertainty and the Macroeconomy: the Evidence from Canada

The partisan advantage and incumbency advantage versions ofthe rational partisan business cycle model are tested. Bothmodels assume agents form weighted averages of partisaninflation rates during an election period, and differ only inhow the weights are formed which alters the form of businesscycles. The partisan advantage assumes fixed weightsdesignated for both major parties in each election, whereasthe incumbency advantage model assumes fixed weights forwhichever is the incumbent and opposition party in eachelection. The symmetric representation assumes each electionis a toss-up. Strongest support is found for a temporarysymmetric effect on the level of output, but none of themodels are supported for temporary electoral changes in growthor unemployment rates.     

The (Un)predictability of Primaries with Many Candidates: Simulation Evidence

It is common to describe the dynamic processes that generateoutcomes in U.S. primaries as ``unstable'' or ``unpredictable''. In fact, the way we choose candidates may amount to alottery. This paper uses a simulation approach, assuming10,000 voters who vote according to a naive, deterministicproximity rule, but who choose party affiliationprobabilistically. The voters of each party then must choose between twosets of ten randomly chosen candidates, in ``closed'' primaries.Finally, the winners of the two nominations compete in thegeneral election, in which independent voters also participate.The key result of the simulations reported here isthe complete unpredictability of the outcomes of a sequence ofprimaries: the winner of the primary, or the party's nominee,varied as much as two standard deviations from the medianpartisan voter. The reason is that the median, or any othermeasure of the center of the distribution of voters, isof little value in predicting the outcome of multicandidateelections. These results suggest that who runs may havemore to do with who wins than any other consideration. If more than two parties or candidates are expected, then thevote-maximizing position is not close to your opponents, butwell away from them. (Tullock, 1967: 55).     

Partisan Polarization and Congressional Accountability in House Elections

Early research led scholars to believe that institutional accountability in Congress is lacking because public evaluations of its collective performance do not affect the reelection of its members. However, a changed partisan environment along with new empirical evidence raises unanswered questions about the effect of congressional performance on incumbents' electoral outcomes over time. Analysis of House reelection races across the last several decades produces important findings: (1) low congressional approval ratings generally reduce the electoral margins of majority party incumbents and increase margins for minority party incumbents; (2) partisan polarization in the House increases the magnitude of this partisan differential, mainly through increased electoral accountability among majority party incumbents; (3) these electoral effects of congressional performance ratings hold largely irrespective of a member's individual party loyalty or seat safety. These findings carry significant implications for partisan theories of legislative organization and help explain salient features of recent Congresses.