Which Matters Most? Comparing the Impact of Issues and the Economy in American, British and Canadian Elections

Abstract

The objective of this study is to assess and compare the relative impact of issues and the economy on the vote in democratic elections. There is a rich and vast literature dealing with issue voting and an equally impressive literature concerning economic voting. For the most part, however, these amount to two separate streams of research. Relatively little attention has been paid to where these literatures overlap and less still to the simple but basic question: which matters most, the issues or the economy?The main debate in the issue voting literature recently has been between the directional and proximity models. That debate, engaging both technical and conceptual issues, has focused entirely on how issues play in an election, whether voters prefer the party that is closest to their own position or the party that is the strongest defender of their side on an issue. The question of how much issues affect the vote, however, has been neglected. Indeed, both the proximity and directional schools implicitly agree that issues matter, and so challenge the Michigan school's strong scepticism on the import of issues. Given that the difference between the two models is often quite small, a more fruitful line of investigation might be to return to the equally fundamental ‘how much’ question.

A Test of Rivaling Approaches to Explain News Effects: News on Issue Positions of Parties, Real-World Developments, Support and Criticism, and Success and Failure

“…The effect estimates show indeed that the effects derived from the four news types complement rather than exclude each other. Although issue news is often regarded as the most important news type (e.g., Blais et al, 2004), news on success and failures in the media appeared to be the foremost important success factor in the Dutch 2003 electoral campaign. The estimated effects show that voters are remarkably sophisticated in interpreting support and criticism for political parties.…”

“…Research that combines different theoretical approaches in a single empirical study (e.g., Blais, Turgeon, Gidengil, Nevitte, & Nadeau, 2004) is scarce. Apparently, most researchers consider them as mutually exclusive research paradigms, each of them rendering the other ones superfluous.…”

The Incumbent Electoral Defeat in the 2011 Spanish National Elections: The Effect of the Economic Crisis in an Ideological Polarized Party System

“…First, the left -right dimension is generally regarded as the primary axis of party competition in Europe (Aldrich et al, 2010: 5) and the main mechanism through which voters choose a party to represent them (Blais et al, 2004;Freire, 2006;Mair, 2007). 3 While partisanship is recognized as relevant it is generally seen as a less useful cue for voters than other information short-cuts available to them (Downs, 1957;Shively, 1979).…”

Political Ideology and Economic Freedom Across Canadian Provinces

“…The analysis therefore takes place within the same institutional and political setup and broadly similar political tradition. Second, the coding explicitly addresses the first problem by focusing only on economic issues, which takes up an important part of Canadian politics (Kam, 2001;Cross and Young, 2002;Blais et al, 2004). Third, as we outline below, we consider a specific source of movements in the political scale to address the potential problem of temporal comparisons.…”