Hard choices in hard times: Valence voting in Germany (2009)

Recent studies of voting behavior in Anglo-American elections have demonstrated the clear superiority of the valence model over its rivals for explaining how people cast their ballots. In this paper we test the portability of the valence model in a particularly challenging setting the 2009 German Parliamentary elections. Although there are reasons to think that a spatial model might outperform the valence model, we find that the valence model outperforms it with results similar to previous findings in other political settings.     

Reaching for profit in the welfare state: Patrimonial economic voting in Denmark

Economic voting has been well-studied in a number of advanced industrial democracies, including Denmark. However, that work has been almost entirely on the valence dimension, i.e., rewarding or punishing government according to whether the overall economy prospers. Recent work has looked at other economic voting dimensions, including patrimony, i.e., the impact of property ownership on the vote. A patrimonial effect has been found in the UK, the US, and France. However, it seems to differ somewhat depending on the welfare-character of the state, with the US at one end and France at the other. Here we examine patrimonial economic voting in a still more extreme welfare state - Denmark. In our analysis of voting in the 2011 parliamentary election, we establish two new findings: 1. patrimonial economic voting exists in Denmark and, 2. its effect is stronger than that for other countries studied thus far.     

Two types of economic voting: How economic conditions jointly affect vote choice and turnout

The economic voting literature mostly looks at vote choice, ignoring potential effects on turnout. Studies that do focus on the latter often ignore the former, and come to contradictory conclusions. I develop a model of economic voting that jointly incorporates vote choice and abstention due to alienation or indifference. Analyzing ten elections with validated turnout data and conducting empirically informed simulations, I make two contributions. First, I show that “turnout switching” accounts for up to one third of total economic voting. This second type of economic voting is more common when the number of parties is low and responsibility is dispersed. Second, I show that a bad economy moves some people to abstain while having the opposite effect on others. The aggregate effect is ambiguous and related to macro-conditions in a non-linear way. This explains contradictory findings in the literature.     

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.     

Valence politics and electoral choice in a new democracy: The case of Taiwan

After two peaceful alternations of political power in a single decade, Taiwan is a democratic success story, demonstrating levels of party competition, turnout rates and patterns of civic engagement similar to those in mature Western democracies. What factors drive electoral choice in Taiwan's new democracy? This paper addresses this question by testing rival models of voting behavior using the Taiwan Elections and Democratization Study (TEDS) 2008 presidential election survey data and the 2010 mayoral election survey data. Analyses show that, similar to their counterparts in mature democracies, Taiwanese voters place more emphasis on the performance of political parties and their leaders in delivering policies designed to address valence issues concerning broadly shared policy goals than on position issues or more general ideological stances that divide the electorate. Findings demonstrating the strength of the valence politics model of electoral choice in Taiwan closely resemble the results of analyses of competing models of voting behavior in Western countries such as Great Britain and the United States.     

Multi-dimensional economic voting in Spain: The 2008 election

Economic voting studies remain contentious in Spain. The notion is widely-held that there is no economic vote in that country, due to the pervasive and effacing influences of left-right ideology. Still, a growing number of investigations show a significant impact of economic evaluation on the vote choice in Spanish national elections. At least one possible exception here is the 2008 election, where the question has received no systematic treatment. In this study, we explore the impact of economic voting in that contest. We find, first, the presence of strong economic voting of the valence kind. Second, we find that two hitherto unstudied dimensions of economic voting – position and patrimony – have their own independent effect.     

Economic voting under the economic crisis: Evidence from Greece

Having joined the Eurozone in 2001, Greece experienced a short period of economic euphoria before confronting a major financial crisis some nine years later. In the period between joining the Eurozone and accepting the joint IMF/EU bailout package, the economic situation facing Greek voters changed dramatically. I use this setting to test the economic voting hypothesis. Using longitudinal aggregate data from 1981 to 2009, I investigate the relationship between macroeconomic indicators and vote share of the incumbent party to test the “grievance asymmetry” hypothesis. Moreover, by using individual-level data from 2004 to 2009, I investigate the extent to which retrospective sociotropic evaluations about the state of the economy are associated with support for the incumbent party. The results suggest that sociotropic economic evaluations are associated with government party support, but in a period when the economy is at its worst the incumbent has no real chance of winning and should expect support only from its long-time loyal supporters.     

Reconsidering individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting

This paper proposes a general theory of individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting based on the perspective that the strength of the relationship varies with factors that influence the relevance of the economic evaluation to the vote choice. We posit that the electoral relevance of the economic evaluation increases with the strength of partisanship as well as political sophistication. Given the strong correlation between partisanship and sophistication, this theoretical perspective casts doubt on extant evidence that more sophisticated voters are more likely to hold the incumbent party electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance since this result might be an artifact of failing to control for the economic evaluation being more relevant to the vote choice of stronger partisans. Our statistical investigation of this question finds no significant evidence that sophistication conditions the economic voting relationship once the conditioning effect of partisanship is included in the model. This finding suggests that individual-level heterogeneity in the strength of the economic voting relationship is largely due to stronger partisans voting more consistently with their national economic evaluation than to more sophisticated voters being more policy-oriented by holding the incumbent party more electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance.     

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.     

A communotropic theory of economic voting

Within the social sciences, there is a long and storied history of the effect of economic conditions on vote choice. The traditional arguments are that voters have personal (egotropic) and/or other-regarding (sociotropic) preferences and that they reward and punish politicians electorally based on economic conditions at these levels. However, there is a third option. As industries, employment, and economic conditions are not uniformly distributed across the country, preferences may be locally based. This project combines unique survey data with Metropolitan Statistical Area unemployment numbers and finds evidence of distinct preferences at a third “communotropic” level.     

Rules,institutions and the economic vote: clarifying clarity of responsibility

Abstract

Institutions are thought to matter for vote choice, and work on economic voting is exemplary in this regard. The strength of the economic vote varies considerably cross-nationally and this seems to emanate from differences in the clarity of responsibility. Still, this conceptual frame, dominant in the field, appears to have some cracks. First, almost all work presents analyses of the economic vote in smaller, split samples of low- and high-clarity contexts separately. Second, the literature appears rather dispersed when the conceptual and empirical indicators are examined. The article attempts to overcome these limitations by analysing a large pool of democratic elections with a series of objective indicators. It investigates these indicators separately, and as components within two cumulative indices (institutional rules and power patterns). The results indicate that, even though there are indications of differences in the strength of the economic vote in high- and low-clarity contexts respectively, institutional rules or power patterns fail to significantly deflect the overall electoral impact of economic growth.     

The three stages of the anti-incumbency vote: Retrospective economic voting in young and established democracies

Economic prosperity is the best recipe for an incumbent government to be re-elected. However, the financial crisis was significantly more consequential for governing parties in young rather than in established democracies. This article introduces the age of democracy as a contextual explanation which moderates the degree to which citizens vote retrospectively. It shows a curvilinear effect of the age of democracy on retrospective economic voting. In a first stage after the transition to democracy, reform governments suffer from a general anti-incumbency effect, unrelated to economic performance. In a second step, citizens in young democracies relate the legitimacy of democratic actors to their economic performance rather than to procedural rules, and connect economic outcomes closely to incumbent support. As democracies mature, actors profit from a reservoir of legitimacy, and retrospective voting declines. Empirically, these hypotheses are corroborated by data on vote change and economic performance in 59 democracies worldwide, over 25 years.     

Migrants' remittances and economic voting in the Mexican countryside

This study advances and tests hypotheses about the effects of migrants' remittances on political behavior. Analyzing new survey data from Mexico, I find that despite being very poor, respondents who receive remittances tend to view their income as more stable than neighbors who do not receive this money. As a result, remittance recipients have relatively fewer economic grievances and tend to feel more optimistic about economic matters than neighbors who do not receive remittances. According to the economic voter thesis, citizens who are more satisfied with the economy are also less likely to pressure and oppose politicians, particularly incumbents. Analyses indicate that respondents in this sample who receive remittances are indeed less likely to lobby local officials for economic assistance. They were also less likely to mobilize against and punish the incumbent party in the 2006 Mexican presidential election.     

The campaign dynamics of economic voting

This paper considers the relationship between election campaigns and the impact of economic evaluations on vote choice. The motivation is the standard expectation that the campaign generally serves to amplify the significance of economic considerations in the voter's calculus—to focus his/her attention on this “fundamental” element of the electoral decision. Drawing on survey data from ten national elections across four countries (Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) and applying both parametric and semi-parametric statistical techniques, the paper finds no support for this proposition. The paper reflects on the significance of this conclusion for work on political learning during election campaigns, the literature on economic voting, and the study of electoral behaviour more generally.     

Economic voting in a crisis: The Irish election of 2011

The paper explores a question raised by the 2011 Irish election, which saw an almost unprecedented decline in support for a major governing party after an economic collapse that necessitated an ECB/IMF ‘bailout’. This seems a classic case of ‘economic voting’ in which a government is punished for incompetent performance. How did the government lose this support: gradually, as successive economic indicators appeared negative, or dramatically, following major shocks? The evidence points to losses at two critical junctures. This is consistent with an interpretation of the link between economics and politics that allows for qualitative judgements by voters in assigning credit and blame for economic performance.     

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.     

Valence politics and economic crisis: Electoral choice in Canada 2008

This paper investigates factors affecting voting behavior in Canada’s October 2008 federal election. The election was held in the context of a rapidly worsening financial crisis that threatened to become a global economic meltdown. National survey data gathered in the 2008 Political Support in Canada Study reveal that the deteriorating economy trumped the opposition Liberal Party’s Green Shift Program as the major campaign issue by a huge margin. Damage done to the governing Conservatives by the economic crisis was limited by perceptions of their leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Analyses of a mixed logit model of electoral choice shows that although the Conservatives had a relatively small share of party identifiers and Harper was widely disliked, his image as “safe pair on hands” helped his party weather the political storm generated by the flood of bad economic news.     

Performance voting and knowledge of cabinet composition

Nearly every empirical study of outcome oriented retrospective voting assumes, though almost always implicitly, that a) every voter knows the composition of the incumbent government, or b) that voters who may not know who is in government do not cast retrospective votes. In this short essay we provide evidence that these assumptions are quite unlikely to hold and discuss how not taking this possibility into account has influenced our understanding of the retrospective voting mechanism and the conditioning effect of political sophistication on the economic vote. In so doing, we advocate for the inclusion of questions regarding cabinet composition in electoral surveys.