While there are many studies on the impact of the economy on elections, there is little evidence on the full mechanism of economic voting implied by performance-based theories of elections. Addressing the scarcity of evidence on the mechanism, this study provides the first estimates of the linkage between macroeconomic performance, individual economic evaluations, and vote choice. Building on recent advances in the statistical analysis of causal mechanisms, we conduct a causal mediation analysis in a data set covering 151 surveys in 18 countries. We find that the effect of economic performance on the incumbent vote is largely accounted for by voters’ retrospective evaluations of the national economy. The effect is stronger in contexts where policymaking power is concentrated rather than dispersed. Altogether, the results imply that the performance-based channel of voting is more relevant in accounting for election outcomes than suggested by recent individual-level studies.

This paper proposes a general theory of individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting based on the perspective that the strength of the relationship varies with factors that influence the relevance of the economic evaluation to the vote choice. We posit that the electoral relevance of the economic evaluation increases with the strength of partisanship as well as political sophistication. Given the strong correlation between partisanship and sophistication, this theoretical perspective casts doubt on extant evidence that more sophisticated voters are more likely to hold the incumbent party electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance since this result might be an artifact of failing to control for the economic evaluation being more relevant to the vote choice of stronger partisans. Our statistical investigation of this question finds no significant evidence that sophistication conditions the economic voting relationship once the conditioning effect of partisanship is included in the model. This finding suggests that individual-level heterogeneity in the strength of the economic voting relationship is largely due to stronger partisans voting more consistently with their national economic evaluation than to more sophisticated voters being more policy-oriented by holding the incumbent party more electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance.

Segnalazione bibliografica. American Political Science Review (2011), 105: 115-134 Autori: Henry E. Brady, John E. McNulty Abstract Could changing the locations of polling places affect the outcome of an election by increasing the costs of voting for some and decreasing them for others? The consolidation of voting precincts in Los Angeles County during California's 2003 gubernatorial recall election provides a natural experiment for studying how changing polling places influences voter turnout. Overall turnout decreased by a substantial 1.85 percentage points: A drop in polling place turnout of 3.03 percentage points was partially offset by an increase in absentee voting of 1.18 percentage...

Segnalazione bibliografica. British Journal of Political Science (2011), 41: 287-314 Autori: David Sanders, Harold D. Clarke, Marianne C. Stewart, Paul Whiteley Abstract A six-wave 2005–09 national panel survey conducted in conjunction with the British Election Study provided data for an investigation of sources of stability and change in voters’ party preferences. The authors test competing spatial and valence theories of party choice and investigate the hypothesis that spatial calculations provide cues for making valence judgements. Analyses reveal that valence mechanisms – heuristics based on party leader images, party performance evaluations and mutable partisan attachments – outperform a spatial model in terms of strength of direct effects on party choice....