Punishing without rewards? A comprehensive examination of the asymmetry in economic voting

It has been controversial whether incumbents are punished more for a bad economy than they are rewarded for a good economy due to mixed results from previous studies on one or handful number of countries. This paper makes an empirical contribution to this lingering question by conducting extensive tests on whether this asymmetry hypothesis is a cross-nationally generalizable phenomenon using all currently available modules of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems survey from 122 elections in 42 representative democracies between 1996 and 2016, as well as macro-economic indicators and individual-level economic perception. In general, this paper finds little support for the asymmetry hypothesis; although the evidence of such asymmetric economic voting is found in some subpopulations using certain economic indicators, these conditional effects are largely inconsistent, suggesting that it is still safe to assume a linear relationship between economic conditions and support for the incumbent.     

Old wine in new bottles? Reassessing the effects of globalisation on political preferences in Western Europe

In both public and scholarly debates, globalisation has recently been accredited with a massive impact on the political preferences and electoral behaviour of Western citizens. Some go as far as to declare a new cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation, driven, for example, by individuals’ exposure to international competition and their degree of national as opposed to cosmopolitan identification. Extant tests of this argument have, however, relied on class and education as proxies for these processes. In contrast, this study provides a direct test of the influence of the globalisation processes on attitudes to economic distribution, the European Union and immigration as well as on vote choice across nine West European countries. The results show that variables tapping the core aspects of globalisation have relatively little impact on attitudes and vote choice; are largely unable to account for the effects of class and education; and do not seem to lead to the establishment of new divisions between winners and losers within or across classes. Rather, the winners and losers of globalisation seem to be the traditional winners and losers with respect to material positions and political influence in modern Western societies – that is, those placed higher as opposed to lower in the class and education hierarchies. In this way, the proposed cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation may seem to be rather much like old wine in new bottles.     

Compared to what? Media-guided reference points and relative economic voting

The idea of the relative economy, or benchmarking economic voting, has been around for a long time. However, the choice of international benchmark(s) remains underspecified, especially in cross-national and time-series studies. This paper argues that the selection process of benchmark(s) should be guided by the theory suggesting that voters benchmark countries that are similar, familiar, and connected, and that media guide voters to appreciate these reference points. Using domestic media coverage from Lexis-Nexis spanning 22 languages, 29 democracies, and over 30 years, this research identifies the unique reference points across time and space. Analysis of this novel dataset shows that voters react strongly to relative economic performance when they make vote choices. Moreover, the benchmarking effects become more pronounced with highly educated populations, but are not affected by clarity of responsibility.     

布雷顿森林模式的改革研究

布雷顿森林模式是一种基本投票权和加权投票权相结合的加权表决制度,它存在许多问题。解决方法有:赋予发展中国家更多的与其地位和作用一致的投票权,增加基本票在总投票权中的比重,采用集团投票制,各机构改革分开进行,并应有独立的份额分配公式,选择合理的参数和权重,改进GDP的计算方法,以上这些都要纳入法制化轨道。发展中国家对待改革要讲究策略,谨慎看待已取得的改革成果,对改革的渐进性和艰巨性要有充分认识,建立发展中国家之间的协调机制,发展本国经济,增加综合国力。     

The party choice set and satisfaction with democracy

A well-functioning democracy requires citizens’ support for its political institutions and procedures. While scholars have previously studied the role of contextual factors for explaining satisfaction with democracy, a rigorous focus on how the party choice set affects how satisfied citizens are with democracy is largely absent from the literature. This neglect of the impact of parties is surprising, given their central position within modern, representative democracies. In this article, a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the impact of party systems on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy is presented. Use is made of the combined data of the first four modules of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project and various measures of the party system are used to capture different aspects of the party choice set: the number of parties, their polarisation, and the congruence between public opinion and the party offer. In contrast to expectations, only scant evidence is found that having a wider choice increases citizens’ satisfaction with democracy.     

Proximity voting in the 2010 U.S. House elections

Utilizing data that allows for the placement of both of the candidates running and voters on the same ideological scale, I model proximity voting in the 2010 House elections. I demonstrate that though the literature predominantly emphasizes partisanship and incumbency, relative distance from the candidates also plays a significant role in the voting decision. Additionally, I show that these proximity effects are conditional upon the type of candidate running and the individual's partisan attachment. In total, these results show that while the rates of partisan voting and incumbent victory are high in House elections, voters do consider ideological proximity and can punish candidates who take positions that are too far out of line.     

Local campaign activity and voting

Two types of data are used to address separate but related questions about the 2011 referendum on the parliamentary voting system. First, a survey of individual candidates at the coincident local government elections examines the extent to which local campaigning was used by the parties (as surrogates for the 'Yes' and 'No' camps) to provide information and decision cues to electors. Second, aggregate data at local authority-level compares participation in and voting preferences at the two electoral events. The combination of evidence suggests that while having coincident local elections helped to boost turnout in the referendum, the impact of local-level campaigning on the referendum outcome was marginal at best.     

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.