Elsevier

Electoral Studies

Volume 21, Issue 3, September 2002, Pages 403-423
Electoral Studies

A cross-national analysis of economic voting: taking account of the political context across time and nations

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0261-3794(01)00002-6Get rights and content

Abstract

Powell and Whitten (Am. J. Polit. Sci. 37 (1993) 391) showed that clarity of responsibility for public policy is a key determinant of the extent of economic voting, where their measure of clarity relies heavily on long-term institutional factors. Work since then suggests that clarity of responsibility is variable across time as well as space. We create a new index that combines long-term factors with medium- and short-term factors, permitting us to examine the strength of economic voting not only across a range of countries but over time within single countries. We test the new measure using individual-level data from eight European countries over a 16-year time span. The test also uses a refined measure of retrospective economic performance based on the aggregation of individual observations. We find a strong relationship between our expanded index of clarity of responsibility and the level of economic voting. As anticipated, levels of clarity vary substantially over time within countries as well as between individual countries and groups of countries. The fact that clarity tends to peak in majoritarian systems underlines an apparent contradiction between clarity and consensualism and raises interesting questions for democratic theories in general and voting behavior in particular.

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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