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When Do Citizens Respond Politically to the Local Economy? Evidence from Registry Data on Local Housing Markets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2019

MARTIN VINÆS LARSEN ,
FREDERIK HJORTH Open the ORCID record for FREDERIK HJORTH [Opens in a new window] ,
PETER THISTED DINESEN Open the ORCID record for PETER THISTED DINESEN [Opens in a new window]  and
KIM MANNEMAR SØNDERSKOV Open the ORCID record for KIM MANNEMAR SØNDERSKOV [Opens in a new window]
MARTIN VINÆS LARSEN*
Affiliation:
Aarhus University
FREDERIK HJORTH*
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
PETER THISTED DINESEN*
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
KIM MANNEMAR SØNDERSKOV*
Affiliation:
Aarhus University
*
*Martin Vinæs Larsen, Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, mvl@ps.au.dk.
†Frederik Hjorth, Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, fh@ifs.ku.dk.
‡Peter Thisted Dinesen, Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, ptd@ifs.ku.dk.
**Kim Mannemar Sønderskov, Professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, ks@ps.au.dk.
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Abstract

Recent studies of economic voting have focused on the role of the local economy, but with inconclusive results. We argue that while local economic conditions affect incumbent support on average, the importance of the local economy varies by citizens’ interactions with it. More recent and frequent encounters with aspects of the local economy make those aspects more salient and, in turn, feature more prominently in evaluations of the incumbent government. We label this process “context priming.” We provide evidence for these propositions by studying local housing markets. Linking granularly detailed data on housing prices from Danish public registries to both precinct-level election returns and an individual-level panel survey, we find that when individuals interact with the housing market, their support for the incumbent government is more responsive to changes in local housing prices. The study thus provides a framework for understanding when citizens respond politically to the local economy.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 113 , Issue 2 , May 2019 , pp. 499 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019 

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Kraks Fond—Institute for Urban Economic Research, the Carlsberg foundation, and the Danish Council for Independent Research (Social Sciences) for financial support. We also want to acknowledge Amalie Sofie Jensen and Statistics Denmark for help in acquiring and understanding the data on housing prices. Furthermore, we thank the APSR editors and reviewers, Ben Ansell, Martin Bisgaard, Gabriel Lenz, Mikael Persson, and seminar participants at the 2016 APSA Annual Meeting, the 2017 MPSA Annual Meeting, Kraks Fond—Institute for Urban Economic Research Seminar 2017, and Université Laval 2018 for helpful comments. All remaining errors are our own. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EKZQSZ.

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