The fate of governing parties in times of economic crisis

The severity of the recent economic crisis in Europe provides an opportunity to test some of the conventional hypotheses about the effects of economic adversity on election outcomes in a broadly comparative context. In 16 of 27 elections held in EU member countries between 2008 and the end of 2011, incumbent governments went down to defeat. In many of the cases in which a governing party was defeated, a government of the center-left was replaced by one of the center-right. The average level of decline in the share of the vote for governing parties (−8.1%) however was surprisingly modest in comparison with previous election cycles. Nevertheless, the results were devastating for governing parties in a number of instances, such as Ireland or Hungary. We also consider the relative merits of retrospective and prospective interpretations of these outcomes in the light of contextual effects arising from factors such as globalization and institutional clarity as these affect perceptions of the responsibility of governing parties or coalitions in coping with the crisis in the domestic political environment.     

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.     

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.     

Dimensions of the economic vote: Valence,positional and patrimony voting in Portugal's 2011 elections

This article contrasts three dimensions of economic voting, namely valence, positional and patrimony voting. Whereas the first two dimensions have been frequently explored, the patrimony variable has scarcely been tested as an explanatory variable of voting behaviour. It measures the electors' assets (both risky and non-risky), and seeks to capture the elector's wealth at election time. Using the 2011 post-election survey carried out in Portugal following the June elections, the data show that comparing of the three dimensions, valence is the most important. It was found that patrimony variables, although not significant in a comprehensive vote model, are important explanatory factors of party identification, itself a key variable of vote choice in Portugal.     

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.     

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.     

Voter perceptions of agenda power and attribution of responsibility for economic performance

In two recent experiments (one in the lab and one over the internet) concerning collective decision making we determined that individuals mainly assign responsibility to the decision maker with agenda power and with the largest vote share (Duch et al., 2012). We found rather weak evidence that responsibility is assigned to decision makers with veto power or allocated proportional to weighted voting power. Our conjecture then is that individuals in our online experiment who recognized the importance of proposal power in the embedded experiment will be those more likely to exercise an economic vote for the Conservative PM Party (since they are the agenda setter in the governing coalition) and for the opposition Labour Party. The conjecture is confirmed. Essentially, the data show that economic voting at the individual level is confined to individuals who understand the value of proposal power. This in turn suggests that the economic vote itself is motivated by a coherent attempt to punish or reward parties that actually deserve it in the specific sense that they were mostly responsible for choosing the policies that were implemented. Further, the strong reliance on proposal power as the workhorse of this mechanism of accountability, tells us that simple heuristics can do a lot of the work that cold rationality and complex calculation have done in much of the previous discussion of economic voting.     

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.     

Government approval in Italy: Political cycle,economic expectations and TV coverage

This paper analyses government approval in Italy – which has become a key aspect for electoral support in the new party system of the Second Republic – exploring the influence that TV coverage exerts on approval net of traditional accounts of government support. Relying on both aggregate time series and pooled individual-level surveys analyses, it is shown that communication has a sizable impact on government approval. The popularity of Centre-Left and Centre-Right governments is affected evenly by the economy but differently by the news coverage of their activity. People with lower political interest are the most reactive to news coverage of government performance.     

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.     

Economic crisis, party system change, and the dynamics of class voting in Venezuela, 1973–2003

The breakdown of the old catch-all party system in Venezuela, and the sudden rise to power of leftist former coup leader Hugo Chávez provides an instructive case study to examine the sources of party system change, the rise of populism and the politicisation of class. Using nationally representative survey data this paper analyses different models of voting behaviour over time, and examines the extent to which the determinants of electoral choice have changed. It argues that although economic crises during the 1990s undermined support for the existing parties, it did not create a politically salient class-based response. Rather, it created the electoral space for new actors to enter the political stage and articulate new populist issue dimensions. Explanations for the politicisation of social cleavages in Venezuela can therefore best be understood in terms of ‘top-down’ approaches which emphasises the role of political agency in reshaping and re-crafting political identities, rather than more ‘bottom-up’ factors which emphasise the demands that originate within the electorate.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The multi-store model for economic voting: Rome wasn't built in a day

The 2012 presidential election was closely contested with the media predicting that the unemployment rate announcement just before the election would be the deciding factor. If a single economic indicator could buoy up job approval ratings, delivering positive economic statistics to the voters would be a rational re-election strategy for an incumbent. In contrast, this paper presents a model in which voters do not immediately convert each economic statistic into a performance evaluation. Only after many “rehearsals” do voters convert statistics into a positive or negative evaluation. I take the case of Japan and use a survey experiment and an inverse probability weighting (IPW) estimator to assess whether short-, medium- and long-term performance evaluations form based on voter perception of economic conditions.     

The nature of economic perceptions in mass publics

Voters who believe that the nation's economy has been worsening are more inclined to vote against the incumbent president than are those who believe it has not been getting worse. This relationship could be present because voters condition their support for the incumbents upon their perceptions of the economy, or, alternatively, because they condition their perceptions of the economy upon their underlying, partisan-based support of the incumbents.     

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.     

Economic voting in Spain: A 2000 panel test

Considerable research shows the economy matters for voters. But that view has come under attack, with revisionists arguing that it matters little. This dissenting view fits the Spanish case well, where reigning research finds virtually no economic voting exists. We argue against the revisionist view, suggesting that conclusion stems largely from methodological limitations in its supporting cross-sectional survey analyses. Given the causality question these analyses raise, particularly in the context of likely endogeneity, a panel analysis is called for. We examine the most recent available panel survey, from the 2000 general election, estimating fully specified multinomial logit models. We find strong economic effects. Spain appears, after all, to have an electorate capable of holding the government economically accountable, at least in this instance.