A cross-national analysis of economic voting: taking account of the political context across time and nations
Section snippets
Clarity of responsibility and economic voting
While there is no doubt that “economics moves political behavior,” to use the opening line from an article by MacKuen et al. (1992, 597), there are numerous questions about the exact connection. Arguments abound, for example, about the extent to which voters are moved by retrospective versus prospective considerations (see, for example, MacKuen et al., 1992, Clarke and Stewart, 1994, Norpoth, 1996a). A related debate concerns the extent to which the media disseminate and voters rely upon
Analysis
To test for the effects of between- and within-country variations in economic voting, the data requirements are quite extensive. We need a measure of intended or actual vote, an assessment of the national economy, and a set of control variables, all of these covering multiple countries and time points. The Eurobarometers satisfy most of the requirements. Here we utilize data for eight countries for the period 1976–1992. This includes all of the countries in the European Community in 1976 except
Conclusion
At least since the pathbreaking analysis by Powell and Whitten, it has been clear that clarity of responsibility for public policy is an important determinant of the strength of economic voting. Initially, clarity was conceived of as a static condition of the polity. Countries were grouped into two distinct subsets; current economic conditions were shown to have a palpable impact on voting behavior in high-clarity countries, but less so in low-clarity countries. The dichotomization was based
Acknowledgements
We thank David Weimer for his sage advice and Christopher Anderson, Harvey Palmer, G. Bingham Powell, and Guy Whitten for comments on a draft of this paper.
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