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Context and the Economic Vote: A Multilevel Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Raymond M. Duch  and
Randy Stevenson
Raymond M. Duch*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Houston, 4800 Calhoun, Houston, TX 77204-3011
Randy Stevenson
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Rice University, P.O. Box 1892, Houston, Texas 77251-1892. e-mail: stevenso@ruf.rice.edu
*
e-mail: rduch@uh.edu (corresponding author)
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Abstract

Voters use observed economic performance to infer the competence of incumbent politicians. These economic perceptions enter the voter's utility calculations modified by a weight that is minimized when the variance in exogenous shocks to the economy is very large relative to the variance in economic outcomes associated with the competence of politicians. Cross-national variations in the political and economic context systematically increase or undermine the voter's ability to ascertain the competency of incumbents. We test one hypothesis: As policy-making responsibility is shared more equally among parties, economic evaluations will be more important in the vote decision. We employ two multilevel modeling procedures for estimating the contextual variations in micro-level economic voting effects: a conventional pooled approach and a two-stage procedure. We compare the multivariate results of a pooled method with our two-stage estimation procedure and conclude that they are similar. Our empirical efforts use data from 163 national surveys from 18 countries over a 22-year period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 13 , Issue 4: Special Issue on Multilevel Modeling for Large Clusters , Autumn 2005 , pp. 387 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Authors' note: We acknowledge the generous support of the National Science Foundation that funded this project with grant SBR-0215633. We thank the participants of the Princeton University Workshop on Multi-Level Modeling (Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, October 22–24, 2004) for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions.

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