Economic Voting in Latin America: Rules and Responsibility

The impact of institutions on the economic vote stands as a well‐established proposition for the advanced democracies of Europe. We know less, however, regarding the institutional effects on the economic vote in the developing democracies of Latin America. Carrying out an analysis of presidential elections in 18 Latin American countries, we offer evidence that the usual Eurocentric conceptualization of the clarity of responsibility is not ideal for understanding the economic vote in this region. There does exist a powerful effect of institutions on the economic vote within Latin American democracies, but one uniquely associated with its presidential regimes and dynamic party systems. Rules for these elections—such as concurrence, term limits, and second‐round voting—suggest that we should reconceptualize the notion of the clarity of responsibility in Latin America, focusing more on individuals in power and their constraints, and less on the political parties from which they hail.     

Shocks and oscillations: The political economy of Hungary

While economic voting studies exist for the new democracies in post-communist Europe, time-series vote functions are scarce. Here, we fill this void by testing how public support for the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) responds to political shocks and economic oscillations, using monthly data from 2002 to 2009 (N = 83). As the economy fluctuates, on both objective and subjective measures, Hungarians reward or punish the Prime Minister’s party in the traditional manner. Political shocks, including the change to an MSZP minority government, the 2006 riots, and the IMF bailout, induced increased support for the party while troops in Iraq and the election campaign led Hungarians to be less supportive of the party. Clearly, government support in Hungary can be explained in political economic terms, despite the newness of democracy and the severe economic uncertainties of the times.     

Trust in elections,vote buying,and turnout in Latin America

Although national elections in Latin America are now described as reasonably free and fair by international observations teams, electoral processes are still affected by a series of malpractices (unequal access to the media and public resources, registration problems, vote buying). These irregularities negatively affect citizens' trust in elections. In this paper, we analyze the consequences of low trust in elections and exposure to vote buying practices on electoral participation in Latin America. Using data from the 2010 wave of LAPOP surveys, we find that perceiving that the election is unfair reduces the willingness to participate in national elections, but receiving material incentives during the campaign has the opposite effect of increasing electoral participation. We also show that the effect of trust in elections on turnout is larger in countries where voting is not mandatory.     

Economics, Party, and the Vote: Causality Issues and Panel Data

Conventional wisdom argues that national economic perceptions generally have an important impact on the vote choice in democracies. Recently, a revisionist view has arisen, contending that this link, regularly observed in election surveys, is mostly spurious. According to the argument, partisanship distorts economic perception, thereby substantially exaggerating the real vote connection. These causality issues have not been much investigated empirically, despite their critical importance. Utilizing primarily American, and secondarily British and Canadian, election panel surveys, we confront directly questions of the time dynamic and independent variable exogeneity. We find, after all, economics clearly matters for the vote. Indeed, once these causality concerns are properly taken into account, the impact of economic perceptions emerges as larger than previously thought. As well, the actual impact of partisanship is clearly reduced.     

Poverty and vote buying: Survey-based evidence from Africa

Alongside the spread of democracy in the developing world, vote buying has emerged as an integral part of election campaigns. Yet, we know little about the causes of vote buying in young democracies. In this paper, we analyse the sources of vote buying in sub-Saharan African. Using data from the Afrobarometer, we focus on the impact of poverty on vote buying at the individual- and country-level. Results from multilevel regressions show that poor voters are significantly more likely to be targets of vote buying than wealthier voters. This effect increases when elections are highly competitive. Thus, micro-level poverty seems to be an important source of vote buying in Africa and has major implications for the way electoral democracy operates.     

Economic voting in Sweden 1985–2010

Despite the fact that Sweden has the world’s second longest time-series of national election Studies, the standard model of micro-level economic voting has only been occasionally applied in Sweden. This study presents a long-term perspective on economic voting in Sweden and analyzes to what extent economic perceptions influence governmental support in general elections in Sweden at the eight latest parliamentary elections, 1985--2010. To this end, this article makes use of the rolling two-wave panels of the Swedish national election studies and estimates the probability of voting for the government depending on economic perceptions, previous vote, ideology and a set of SES controls. The results show that Swedish voting behaviour is no exception to that of most western democracies; subjective economic evaluations of the Swedish economy systematically influence government support. If voters feel the economy is improving they are more likely to vote for the incumbent government than when they feel the economy is getting worse.     

Not always second order: Subnational elections,national-level vote intentions,and volatility spillovers in a multi-level electoral system

The widespread second-order view on subnational elections leaves little room for the idea that subnational election campaigns matter for national-level electoral preferences. I challenge this perspective and explore the context-conditional role of subnational election campaigns for national-level vote intentions in multi-level systems. Campaigns direct citizens’ attention to the political and economic “fundamentals” that determine their electoral preferences. Subnational election campaigns and the major campaign issues receive nation-wide media coverage. This induces all citizens in a country to evaluate parties at the national level even if they themselves are not eligible to vote in the upcoming subnational election. Thereby, subnational election campaigns may lead to a reduction in the uncertainty of voters’ national-level electoral preferences throughout the country, which is reflected by a decrease in the volatility of national-level vote intentions. I explore weekly vote intention data from Germany (1992–2007) within a conditional volatility model. Subnational elections reduce uncertainty in nation-wide federal-level vote intentions for major parties. However, patterns of incumbency and coalitional shifts moderate this volatility-reducing effect.     

Revitalizing the United States‐Japanese alliance

Abstract

While the notion that subjective economic perceptions as well as objective economic conditions affect electoral outcomes has long been explored in advanced democracies and new democracies, evidence of the link between the economy and elections has been rarely found in East Asian countries. As economic issues have become salient since the 1997 financial crisis, political leaders’ capacity to manage the economy has become one of the most important criteria in electoral choice in East Asia. This paper examines how economic issues influenced the results of the 2007 presidential election in South Korea. By making use of the 2007 Presidential Election Panel Study, this study examines the continuity of and changes in the Korean voters’ electoral behavior. This study describes the political situation in the post-1997 financial crisis period under two liberal governments in Korea and introduces the processes and characteristics of electoral campaigns in the 2007 presidential election. This paper then explores the link between the economy and vote choice, focusing on whether economic issues were salient among the electorate, whether retrospective or prospective economic voting was prevalent among Koreans, and how the voters supported Lee Myung Bak across age groups, regions, and parties in the 2007 presidential election.     

Social structure and voting in the Austrian party system

An analysis of electoral behaviour in the Austrian party system shows that the cleavages, social class and religion, are still playing a major role—their total impact seems higher than in most Western democracies. In the seventies a declining influence of both dimensions can be registered; but after closer inspection, most of it seems to be due to structural changes.Particularly the expansion of intermediate and higher education can be hypothesized to dissolve the traditional Lager-structure, which made for a very stable vote throughout the electoral history of the Second Austrian Republic. But the question remains, whether the increase in floating vote really supersedes the class and religious cleavages, or only produces more oscillating election outcomes.The analysis also makes clear why regional cleavages are of minor general impact in Austria: on the one hand, historical West-East differentiations prevail over urban-rural cleavages, on the other hand, Austria seems to be too small to give way to major cultural drifting between regions. None the less, the impact of social structure upon voting behaviour seems to be significantly higher than in most Western nations.     

Economic globalization and voter turnout in established democracies

This paper asks whether international economic integration negatively affects electoral turnout. The theoretical model builds on the premise that economic integration constrains the ability of national governments to shape outcomes. Citizens are conscious of such constraints and take them into account when considering the costs and benefits of casting a vote in national elections. The result is a lower inclination to vote under conditions of high economic integration. Consequently, aggregate turnout is lower the more internationally integrated a national economy is. Analysis of aggregate data for parliamentary elections in 23 OECD democracies over the period 1965–2006 robustly supports this hypothesis. The empirical estimates suggest economic globalization as a central cause of the general decline in turnout within established democracies.     

Electoral accountability in the developing world

Do citizens of the developing world behave as economic voters? Do they blame and reward incumbent governments for their perceived economic performance? In addressing these questions, the current paper fills an important void left by the extant literature by adopting a large-n approach with the use of public opinion survey data and by focusing on emerging democracies of the developing world. The proposed analysis develops a series of incumbent support models to assess the impact of economic assessments. It relies on the use of public opinion survey data from countries of Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and East Asia, and the Arab world. The paper contributes to the extant literature at the empirical, methodological, and theoretical levels. Empirically, it provides a unique and systematic account of the phenomenon through a large-scale comparative approach. Theoretically, it contributes to the debate on the value of economic voting to explain electoral behavior in the developing world. Methodologically, it shows that using presidential approval is a fair alternative to vote choice and that a full model specification is not absolutely necessary to estimating the economic effect.     

Volatile voters,short-term choices? An analysis of the vote choice determinants of stable and volatile voters in Great Britain†

The increase of electoral volatility in established democracies is typically interpreted as proof that short-term factors are increasingly important determinants of vote choice. The empirical evidence to support this assertion, however, is relatively weak. This paper addresses this question by investigating the impact of both long- and short-term determinants on the vote choices of stable and volatile voters in Britain. Analysis of three British election panels (1992–1997, 1997–2001 and 2005–2010) indicates that short-term factors – especially economic issues – do have more weight in determining the vote choices of volatile voters compared with stable voters. However, the results also reveal that the growth in instability of voting behaviour is driven mainly by the weakening impact of long-term factors and not by increasing importance of short-term determinants of the vote choice. Short-term predictors are becoming more important, therefore, but this gain in strength is in relative rather than absolute terms.     

Economic influences on legislative elections in multiparty systems: France and Italy

For the United States, the issue of the impact of aggregate economic conditions on legislative election returns has received extensive research. For European countries, however, research is much less plentiful. In particular, multiparty systems such as France and Italy lack study. For both these nations, we find that worsening aggregate economic conditions significantly increase the legislative vote for leftist parties, which have traditionally played an opposition role. Further, these models seem strong enough to provide good prediction of the actual legislative vote share. For example, they manage to forecast the 1981 victory of the left in France, and the 1980 Communist party support in Italy.     

District magnitude and voter turnout a multi-level analysis of self-reported voting in the 32 Dominican Republic districts

Although studies of electoral participation in established democracies are abundant, little attention has been devoted to Latin American democracies and few studies combine individual-level and contextual-level variables. We focus on electoral participation in 32 districts of a Latin American democracy, the Dominican Republic. Our research question is: how to explain the different impact of district magnitude in Latin America? Most importantly, we find that it has a negative effect on electoral participation whereas theories based on established democracies would predict the opposite. We argue that the negative effect is caused by the stronger influence of clientelism in smaller districts, which surfaces at less salient elections. This argument accounts for previously unexplained findings in studies of Latin America.     

Looking to the future: Prospective economic voting in 2008 Presidential Elections

Despite the economic turmoil of the time, a typical study of vote choice in the 2008 US Presidential Election would (falsely) find little evidence that voters’ opinions about the future state of the economy affected their vote choice. We argue that this misleading conclusion results from serious measurement error in the standard prospective economic evaluations survey question. Relying instead on a revised question, included for the first time in the 2008 American National Election Study, we find that most respondents condition their prospective economic evaluations on potential election outcomes, and that these evaluations are an important determinant of vote choice. A replication in a very different political context – the 2008 Ghanaian election – yields similar results.     

Cross-national election surveys: A French pre-test

In common with scholars in other leading democracies, election researchers of France and the United States rely heavily on a survey research methodology; but their respective national election surveys do not pose many of the same questions, and the dominant research paradigms in each country offer opposing explanatory models of vote choice. Herein are reported preliminary results from a joint effort of US and French researchers, which seeks to include numerous cross-national items in the French National Election Study (for 1995). The following American National Election Study (ANES)-type items receive attention: candidate feeling thermometers, job approval ratings, economic evaluations, seven-point proximity measures on social issues and party identification. Inclusion of these measures in French surveys may allow an important cross-nation extension of voting models thought to be peculiar to one political culture, such as the US.     

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.     

The election timing advantage: Empirical fact or fiction?

Do non-fixed election dates in Westminster parliamentary democracies create an unfair incumbent advantage? The consensus in the literature is that the incumbent party can gain an advantage at the ballot box by controlling election timing (Bakvis, 2001; Docherty, 2010; Smith, 2004; White, 2005; Wolinetz, 2005). Surprisingly, however, there is a lack of empirical evidence to support this claim. We address this lacuna by providing an empirical test of whether the election-timing power matters for incumbent vote support. We do so by employing an innovative web-based voting experiment. Our findings show that the government does gain an advantage by timing an election when it is to their advantage, but the context is limited to conditions where the election follows immediately after a heightened level of positive government coverage.     

Campaign Persuasion and Nascent Partisanship in Mexico's New Democracy

Despite ample evidence of preelection volatility in vote intentions in new democracies, scholars of comparative politics remain skeptical that campaigns affect election outcomes. Research on the United States provides a theoretical rationale for campaign effects, but shows little of it in practice in presidential elections because candidates’ media investments are about equal and voters’ accumulated political knowledge and partisan attachments make them resistant to persuasive messages. I vary these parameters by examining a new democracy where voters’ weaker partisan attachments and lower levels of political information magnify the effects of candidates’ asymmetric media investments to create large persuasion effects. The findings have implications for the generalizability of campaign effects theory to new democracies, the development of mass partisanship, candidate advertising strategies, and the specific outcome of Mexico's hotly contested 2006 presidential election. Data come primarily from the Mexico 2006 Panel Study.     

Who Votes for the Future? Information,Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting

Voters’ four primary evaluations of the economy—retrospective national, retrospective pocketbook, prospective national, and prospective pocketbook—vary in the cognitive steps necessary to link economic outcomes to candidates in elections. We hypothesize that the effects of the different economic evaluations on vote choice vary with a voter’s ability to acquire information and anticipate the election outcome. Using data from the 1980 through 2004 US presidential elections, we estimate a model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations as well as information and uncertainty moderators. The effects of retrospective evaluations on vote choice do not vary by voter information. Prospective economic evaluations weigh in the decisions of the most informed voters, who rely on prospective national evaluations when they believe the incumbent party will win and on prospective pocketbook evaluations when they are uncertain about the election outcome or believe that the challenger will win. Voters who have accurate expectations about who will win the election show the strongest relationship between their vote choice and sociotropic evaluations of the economy, both retrospective and prospective. Voters whose economic evaluations are most likely to be endogenous to vote choice show a weaker relationship between economic evaluations and their votes than the voters who appear to be more objective in their assessments of the election. Economic voting is broader and more prospective than previously accepted, and concerns about endogeneity in economic evaluations are overstated.