Financial Crisis, Austerity, and Electoral Politics: European Voter Responses to the Global Economic Collapse 2009-2013 by Pedro Magalhães

Author:Pedro Magalhães [Magalhães, Pedro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781138856783
Google: XM_RoQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 26407566
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-03-25T09:14:49+00:00

The results show, first, that the coefficient for the Government exclusive responsibility variable is significant for the contrast between the PS and the PSD. Figure 7 shows both the predicted net change and the proportional change in the probability of voting for the PS and the PSD that results from an increase of one standard deviation in the Government exclusive responsibility variable.

The extent to which voters attributed exclusive responsibility for the economy to the government indeed made a difference: it increased significantly the probability of voting for the PSD and diminished the probability of voting for the incumbent Socialists. The proportional change is clearly much smaller than that associated with evaluations of government performance, as we could see in Figure 5, but it is nevertheless relevant. The second hypothesis, following Lobo and Lewis-Beck (2012), is that assignments of responsibility to the European Union may have conditioned the relationship between perceptions of the economy and vote choices. It is well known that direct readings of the coefficients for the constitutive elements of interaction terms, which we can see in Table A4, can be very deceptive (Brambor et al., 2006). Therefore, I estimated the effects of the Retrospective national economy variable on the probability of voting for the incumbent under different values of the EU responsibility for the economy variable. Although the results show that the point estimates of the marginal effect of economic evaluations decrease as the perceived EU responsibility increases. However, those marginal effects, even when the EU is seen as blameless, are never statistically significant.

In sum, the evidence falls more in favour of a direct relationship between responsibility judgments on the vote than of its moderating role on the relationship between economic perceptions and the vote. To be sure, as it occurred with economic evaluations, attributions of responsibility are also potentially endogenous, determined themselves by partisanship and other aspects of political support (Tilley & Hobolt, 2011). Simply including partisanship as a control, as it has been done here, is insufficient to fully address this problem. However, the evidence available does favour the conjecture that the Socialist government has been able to frame, near a relevant number of voters, the responsibility for the economic situation as being shared with other agents and forces, and, by doing so, to succeed in mitigating both its own electoral losses and the as gains for the main opposition party.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.