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

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.