A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context

Powell, G. Bingham; Whitten, Guy D.

doi:10.2307/2111378

Cited by 1,632 publications

(1,221 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Banzhaf, 1964;Penrose, 1946;Shapley and Shubik, 1954), the number of veto players (Tsebelis, 2011) and governing party size (see e.g. Anderson, 1995;Lewis-Beck, 1990), and to the extent to which unified control of policymaking by incumbent governments is possible (Powell and Whitten, 1993). Similarly, Finer (1975), Alesina (1997), Lijphart (2012, 12), andFranzese Jr (2002, 12) argue that coalition governments provide less potential for electoral accountability than single party governments, and Duch and Stevenson (2008, author-year ) report that voters are more likely to attribute economic outcomes to single-party majority cabinets than to coalition governments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pivotality and responsibility attribution in sequential voting

Bartling

Fischbacher

Schudy³

2015

Journal of Public Economics

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This paper analyzes responsibility attributions for outcomes of collective decision making processes. In particular, we ask if decision makers are blamed for being pivotal if they implement an unpopular outcome in a sequential voting process. We conduct an experimental voting game in which decision makers vote about the allocation of money between themselves and recipients without voting rights. We measure responsibility attributions for voting decisions by eliciting the monetary punishment that recipients assign to individual decision makers. We find that pivotal decision makers are punished significantly more for an unpopular voting outcome than non-pivotal decision makers. Our data also suggest that some voters avoid being pivotal by voting strategically in order to delegate the pivotal vote to subsequent decision makers.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pivotality and responsibility attribution in sequential voting

Bartling

Fischbacher

Schudy³

2015

Journal of Public Economics

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“…70 Powell and Whitten 1993. creases in unemployment and inflation, in that the estimate on the lagged misery index is negative and significant (-0.22, p < .05).…”

Section: Robustness Checksmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…49 Powell and Whitten 1993;Shugart and Carey 1992. 50 We note that three of the Spanish governments in our study, González IV (1993-1996 welfare spending (t)] which denotes the change in current welfare spending compared to welfare spending in the previous year.…”

Section: Model Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Government Support Respond to Governments’ Social Welfare Rhetoric or their Spending? An Analysis of Government Support in Britain, Spain and the United States

Bernardi¹,

Adams²

2017

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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Issue ownership theory posits that when social welfare is electorally salient, left-wing parties gain public support by rhetorically emphasizing social welfare issues. There is less research, however, on whether left-wing governing parties benefit from increasing social welfare spending. That is, it is not known whether leftist governments gain from acting on the issues they rhetorically emphasize. This article presents arguments that voters will not react to governments’ social welfare rhetoric, and reviews the conflicting arguments about how government support responds to social welfare spending. It then reports time-series, cross-sectional analyses of data on government support, governments’ social welfare rhetoric and social welfare spending from Britain, Spain and the United States, that support the prediction that government rhetoric has no effects. The article estimates, however, that increased social welfare spending sharply depresses support for both left- and right-wing governments. These findings highlight a strategic dilemma for left-wing governments, which lose public support when they act on their social welfare rhetoric by increasing welfare spending.

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“…Since government accountability is the prime mechanism that links national and regional election results, the second-order elections model requires that responsibilities for political and economic conditions can be clearly attributed to specific parties. Shared or consociational government as practiced in Switzerland, however, probably compromises voters' ability to use their vote to sanction the national government (Powell and Whitten 1993), and weakens the signal that political and economic conditions provide about the competence of the incumbent parties (Duch and Stevenson 2005). In line with this, Schloeth (1998) has not found any evidence of ''retrospective voting'' (Fiorina 1981) in Swiss national parliamentary elections, and there are no obvious grounds to expect it to occur at the lower federal levels either.…”

Section: Regional Elections Are In Fact National Electionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Level Elections in Switzerland

Selb

2006

Swiss Political Science Review

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Why do election results at national and regional parliamentary elections in Switzerland differ so widely? And why are these differences more pronounced in some constituencies than in others? This study discusses competing theoretical views of the linkage between elections held at multiple federal levels, and empirically tests their predictions using official election statistics and contextual data from Swiss national and cantonal elections between 1999 and 2003. Despite the spatially and temporally limited scope of this analysis, one conclusion suggests itself: current theories of the linkage suffer from their neglect of features of the electoral systems which may vary between different types of elections. Taking these institutional variations into account, we find a strong systematic relationship between election outcomes at different levels. Moreover, the linkage of election outcomes is, to some extent, contingent upon the degree to which regions are integrated into the national political system: while national trends in party support tend to drive election outcomes in nationally well-integrated cantons, election results ostensibly follow regional electoral developments in more peripheral cantons.

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A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context

Cited by 1,632 publications

References 22 publications

Pivotality and responsibility attribution in sequential voting

Pivotality and responsibility attribution in sequential voting

Does Government Support Respond to Governments’ Social Welfare Rhetoric or their Spending? An Analysis of Government Support in Britain, Spain and the United States

Multi-Level Elections in Switzerland

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