Data and case selection

In order to conduct the empirical analysis, I used a variety of data sources. The individual-level data were obtained from the European Election Studies (EES) Voter study.² Launched in 1979 by an international group of electoral research-ers, the EES is designed to examine electoral participation and voting behaviour in EP elections but also measures citizens’ political perceptions and preferences on a broader scale. The central component of the EES is a post-election survey among representative samples of voters from all EU member-countries. The EES Voter study has been carried out every five years since 1979, conducted immediately after the EP elections (see Appendix 1).³ The fieldwork period ordinarily remains within four weeks after the elections, although in early waves data collection often lasted longer. Earlier studies were carried out as a part of the regular Eurobarometer, but since 1999 the EES Voter study is its own standalone survey. Typically, face-to-face or telephone interviews are con-ducted with a nationally representative sample of citizens aged 18 and more from every EU member-country. Despite wide contextual coverage, each of the studies has been designed in a similar manner and the questionnaires contain a large number of identical questions. These features guarantee a large temporal and geographical variation in the data pool, fulfilling a necessary precondition for the comparative research design.

Although other individual-level datasets are available for European countries that contain good measures of political support, they either exclude consistent questions about key individual-level predictors for the study of economic vot-ing, or lack homogeneity in questionnaires, data collection and sampling proce-dures across studies. One valuable data source for researchers of voting behav-iour is the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), an international collaboration among election study teams from around the world, where a con-sistent set of questions are included in national post-election studies. Unfortu-nately, economic perception measures were only covered in the first and the last survey wave so far. Similarly, economic assessments are not regularly measured in such large and long-established cross-national studies as the Eurobarometer, the European Social Survey (ESS), the European Values Study (EVS) and the World Values Survey (WVS). Many European countries carry out their own

2 See more at http://eeshomepage.net/home/.

3 The fieldwork of the 1989 survey wave was carried out before the EP elections (from October to November 1988). Pre-electoral survey was selected for the current analysis due to availability of the variables needed for the cross-survey comparison.

national election studies (e.g. Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden), but utilise country-specific questionnaires and different methodological techniques, making the comparison of data complicated. Furthermore, the fact that the EES Voter study is conducted simultaneously in all European countries implies that the inter-national political and economic context is constant, which is important for stud-ying the Europe-wide effects of the financial and economic crisis. Using na-tional election studies for comparative analyses of voting behavior can be more complex due to different timing in relation to such events (Oppenhuis 1995).

For these reasons, and given the importance of the cross-sectional time-series research design for testing the stability of economic effects, the EES Voter study with good coverage of comparable empirical data across time and space is preferred here.

Aggregate-level dynamics are modelled using macroeconomic indicators from the Eurostat databases. When the Eurostat data are not available, infor-mation from the OECD and the IMF databank is used instead. All of these sources provide consistent high-quality data on European countries, publicly accessible on their websites and widely used by academic researchers. Because the individual-level analysis covers two dimensions, temporal and geographical, the macro-level data, too, are selected for each country per each year. The time points chosen correspond to the fieldwork year of the EES Voter study waves.

Both survey data and national macroeconomic indicators for all countries and years were pooled into a combined, hierarchically structured dataset.

The dissertation contains three empirical chapters, each of which utilises a slightly different case selection depending on the particular research focus (see Table 4). First of all, three survey years, 1979, 1984 and 1999, were dropped from the analysis throughout. Although data collection for the EES Voter study had already started in 1979, the first survey wave was excluded because it lacks data on the key explanatory variable in the current analysis, retrospective eco-nomic evaluations. The data from 1984 were dropped for the same reason. The EES Voter study from 1999 was excluded due to a conceptually different meas-ure of economic evaluations compared with other years. This leaves us with five comparable survey waves – 1989 (van der Eijk, Oppenhuis, and Schmitt 1993), 1994 (del Castillo et al. 1997), 2004 (Schmitt et al. 2009), 2009 (van Egmond et al. 2011), and the newly published 2014 (Schmitt et al. 2015).⁴

The first empirical chapter, which aims to test the overall robustness of eco-nomic effects on incumbent support, uses data from all of these five waves. The country selection is based on the availability of data throughout the survey years: only countries whose data is to be found in all five waves are included in

4 In 1989 and 1994, the EES Voter study was carried out as a part of the regular Euro-barometer. Depending on the availability of the variables needed for the comparative analysis, data from the 1^st wave of the 1989 survey (EB30) and the fourth wave of the 1994 survey (EB42) are used here.

the analysis. These countries are Denmark, France, Germany⁵, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom⁶. Luxemburg was dropped due to a small number of respondents, and Belgium was excluded because data on vote intention were not collected in 2004. This determines that the focus in this chapter is on Western European countries, whereas Central and Eastern Europe remain excluded. Covering only ‘old Europe’ could be argued as being problematic, but the purpose of this analysis is, ultimately, not to draw conclusions on the entire continent. Rather, the aim is to explore voting behav-iour dynamics over time, while still assuring large variability in political and economic contexts. By including data from 10 countries over the course of 25 years, this requirement is easily satisfied.

The second empirical chapter, testing the stability of economic effects over time, utilises the same set of surveys as the first one. The third empirical chap-ter, however, differs from the others in terms of data coverage. The focus in this chapter is on public reactions to government economic policies, which makes it heavily reliant on aggregate-level indicators measuring government policy stances. Because for most countries this macro data are only available starting from 1995, earlier surveys were dropped. Therefore, the analysis is restricted to three survey waves: 2004, 2009 and 2014. On the positive side, focusing on the most recent waves enables us to considerably extend the geographical cover-age – with time, an increasing number of countries has participated in the EES Voter study. The data used in the third empirical chapter span 24 countries:

Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. To give equal weight to every study, a random sample of approximately 1000 respondents was drawn from each country-year (see Table 1).

This yields a total sample of 55,731 (50 country-years) in Chapters 4 and 5 and 77,531 respondents (72 country-years) in Chapter 6.

5 In 1989, only West Germany was included in the EES Voter study. In 1994, the field-work was conducted separately in West and East Germany, but because by 1994 Germany was officially reunified and elections were held federally, the two datasets have been combined.

6 In 1989, 1994 and 2004, the fieldwork was carried out separately in Great Britain and in Northern Ireland. For the purpose of comparability with later survey waves, the data for Great Britain and Northern Ireland have been combined, and the United Kingdom has been treated as a unitary item throughout the analysis.

Table 1. Number of respondents in the EES Voter study.

1989 1994 2004 2009 2014

Austria - - 1,010 1,000 1,096

Belgium - - 889 1,002 1,084

Cyprus - - 500 1,000 530

Czech Republic - - 889 1,020 1,177

Denmark 1,006 975 1,317 1,000 1,085

Estonia - - 1,606 1,007 1,087

Finland - - 899 1,000 1,096

France 964 972 1,406 1,000 1,074

Germany 1,001 1,981 596 1,004 1,648

Greece 961 964 500 1,000 1,085

Hungary - - 1,200 1,005 1,104

Ireland 927 581 1,151 1,001 1,081

Italy 1,005 982 1,553 1,000 1,091

Latvia - - 1,000 1,001 1,055

Lithuania - - 1,005 1,000 1,096

Luxembourg - - 1,335 1,001 538

Netherlands 984 1,005 1,586 1,005 1,101

Poland - - 960 1,002 1,233

Portugal 930 955 1,000 1,000 1,033

Slovakia - - 1,063 1,016 1,095

Slovenia - - 1,001 1,000 1,143

Spain 951 948 1,208 1,000 1,106

Sweden - - 2,100 1,002 1,144

United Kingdom 1,268 1,277 1,498 1,000 1,421

Total 9,955 10,644 27,272 24,066 26,193

Source: EES Voter study from 1989, 1994, 2004, 2009 and 2014.

Notes: Only respondents age 18 and over. - = not included in the analysis.