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.     

Political knowledge,the decision calculus,and proximity voting

This paper employs an online voting simulation to examine how the vote decision process affects the vote choice. We focus on proximity voting, an empirically powerful but informationally demanding model of voter behavior. Holding contextual factors constant, we find that more politically knowledgeable individuals engage in a deeper and broader decision process prior to casting their ballot, and, in turn, a more detailed decision process boosts the likelihood that one will vote proximately. In addition, we find that detailed decision processes have a stronger link with proximity voting among the most knowledgeable individuals, who are able to skillfully engage with new information.     

Electing Mayors with the Supplementary Vote Method: Evidence from Norway

Both Norway and England have used the supplementary vote (SV) method to elect mayors. SV was intended to elect mayors with a broad popular mandate, and deemed easy for voters to use. Previous research on English mayoral elections focusing on the supply side of the elections has found that voters supporting minority candidates with their first vote face difficulties using the optional second vote to choose among the remaining two top-candidates in municipalities where there are many candidates in the race. A close race, on the other hand, seems to give voters a helping hand in making this choice. Drawing on these findings, we link data on the 48 Norwegian mayoral races to survey data to further explore how the supply side of the elections and individual voter resources affect effective voting and use of the optional second vote. We use both standard logistic regression and multi-level models as statistical tools. The result reveals that 27 out the 48 elected mayors in Norway came out as majority winners (more than 50 per cent of the votes). The analysis suggests that the supply side of the elections is of minor importance for whether voters use their second vote or not. The probability of using the second vote is reduced by age, and voters who claim to understand how the electoral system works use the second vote more frequently. The analysis also reveals considerable variation in the number of first and second votes for the top two candidates (effective votes) between municipalities, and the results suggest that this variability may be explained partly by the closeness of the elections. Voters in municipalities with competitive mayoral races are more likely to vote effectively than voters in municipalities with less competitive elections. At the individual level party members are more likely to vote ineffectively.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Electoral context,habit-formation and voter turnout: A new analysis

Drawing on the concept of habitual voting (Plutzer, 2002), Franklin (2004) argues that the effects of electoral context on voter turnout will be largely limited to the cohorts who have experienced few elections in their lifetime. Those with more electoral experience would thus remain unaffected. Testing the above hypothesis is a way of a feasible indirect examination of the concept of habitual voting. Such tests have so far focused primarily on the impact of electoral competitiveness on turnout. I propose a new superior analysis of Franklin's hypothesis that, I claim, approaches the standards of a natural experiment. My test – focusing on the national election cycles as a contextual trait of the European Parliament elections – delivers new evidence supporting this hypothesis.     

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.