Supplementary tests

Finally, I will perform a number of additional tests in order to address some common methodological concerns in the economic voting literature. More spe-cifically, I will discuss different approaches in operationalising the dependent variable as these vary considerably across studies and often lead to discrepan-cies in conclusions about the performance of economic effects. The tests will provide a robustness check to the main findings presented in this empirical chapter.

The analysis thus far is carried out with the dependent variable defined as support for the incumbent PM party. However, critics may argue that the more obvious choice would be to observe economic effects on the support for any party in the coalition government. For many reasons, focusing on PM party support is well-justified for the purpose of this study (see section 3.4). None-theless, in order to address these concerns, I will replicate the analysis using all government parties to construct the outcome variable. I expect economic effects to be less pronounced in this model compared to the results for the PM party only, because the sanctioning of multiple parties by voters can be mitigated due to lower clarity of responsibility (see Lewis-Beck 1986; Powell and Whitten 1993; Fisher and Hobolt 2010). The new dependent variable is coded as 1 for vote intention for a government party at the time of the conducting of the field-work and as 0 for any other party. In the pooled dataset, 27.5% of all respond-ents indicated their support for a government party and 43.6% for some other party. The vote intention of 28.8% remains unclear. The correlation between two dependent variables, support for PM party and for government, is r=0.83.

I will run a logistic regression analysis, using the exact same set of inde-pendent variables as earlier. Results in Model 1 in Table 8 below indicate that the impact of economic evaluations is similarly strong on government popu-larity as it is on PM party popupopu-larity. Economic effects for all government par-ties are almost identical to those for the PM party only, shown in Model 2 in Table 5 above. Negative economic evaluations reduce the probability of voting for government by 9 percentage points and positive ones increase the proba-bility by 10 percentage points compared to people who think that the economy has not changed over the preceding year. Recall that the corresponding figures for PM party are 8 and 9 percentage points (see Model 2 in Table 5 above).

Thus, using an alternative measurement of party choice lends support to the findings presented earlier and confirms strong economic effects on voter politi-cal preferences.

Table 8. Economic voting models using alternative measurement of the dependent

Economic evaluations: same ref. category ref. category ref. category Economic evaluations: worse -0.09***

(0.01)

-0.07***

(0.01)

-0.08***

(0.01) Economic evaluations: better 0.10***

(0.01) Cabinet time in office logged -0.06

(0.06) -0.01

(0.09) -0.08 (0.05)

McFadden’s R² 0.20 0.18 0.18

N 30,980 21,321 32,918

Source: EES Voter study from 1989, 1994, 2004, 2009 and 2014 for 10 European countries; author’s own calculations.

Notes: Entries are average marginal effects, standard errors in parentheses. Left-right placement, class and religiosity are adjusted for the PM party’s ideology. All control variables are recoded on a 0 to 1 scale.

Country and year dummies are not shown. Standard errors clustered by survey (each country in each year).

***p<0.01 **p<0.05 *p<0.1

Another potential limitation of the current measurement of the dependent vari-able is using vote intention instead of vote choice. This decision stems from the intent to explore voting behaviour at national and not European-level elections.

Unfortunately, due to data limitations, this means having to choose the vote intention question instead of that for vote choice (for more information, see section 3.4 above). Such an approach can be problematic for two reasons.

Firstly, it is not in congruence with the traditional interest in electoral studies in making vote choice the key outcome variable. Secondly, the EES Voter study is carried out as a post-election survey and the fact that respondents have recently voted may affect the findings. It could be argued that the survey data used do not properly express economic voting because voters have engaged in punishing or rewarding shortly before the survey. One way to deal with these issues is to see whether economic evaluations are also associated with vote choice in Euro-pean elections. For this reason, I next repeat the analysis with the dependent variable, where 1 stands for vote choice for the incumbent PM party in an EP election and 0 for any other party. The analysis is only carried out for four sur-vey years out of five as data for 1989 were collected via a pre-election study and do not contain information on vote choice at EP elections. Due to blurred responsibility attribution in the complex European multilevel system (see Tilley, Garry, and Bold 2008; Bartkowska and Tiemann 2015), we are likely to witness weaker economic effects in this model than at the national level.

Altogether, 16.3% of respondents voted for the incumbent PM party in EP election held prior to the survey. 42.6% voted for some other party, and a large proportion, 41%, fall into the ‘missing’ category due to not having voted, refusing to answer the question, etc. The first thing that we see, then, is that changing the dependent variable from vote intention to vote choice considerably reduces the number of units in the analysis. The correlation between vote choice in European elections and vote intention in national elections is r=0.83. The regression results in Model 2 in Table 8 reveal very similar patterns of vote determinants to what we have seen in this analysis up until now. As expected, marginal effects of economic evaluations are somewhat smaller here than in Model 2 in Table 5, indicating weaker sanctioning and rewarding in European elections, but their impact on vote remains solid and significant. Negative per-ceptions clearly reduce and positive ones increase incumbent support in EP elections as well. Again, the findings comfortably withstand the test of alterna-tive measurement of the outcome variable.

Most economic voting studies look at party preference as a dependent vari-able. Less attention, however, has been paid to another mechanism through which citizens are able to express their attitudes, namely whether they decide to turn out at the polling station in the first place. Various authors have criticized the economic voting literature for ignoring the relationship between economic conditions and voter turnout, and have demonstrated that miserable economic conditions can lead people to abstain from voting, for example when the incum-bent party is performing poorly and no other available option is more agreeable to a voter (see Taylor 2000; Stevens 2007; Tillman 2007; Weschle 2014). Using the choice between incumbents and opposition as the dependent variable limits the ability of this study to observe the non-voter category. Therefore, to account for the possibility that citizens may utilise non-voting as a form of electoral punishment, I include abstention from elections in the economic voting model.

The new dependent variable is coded as 1 for vote intention for the incumbent PM party (21.4%), whereas 0 combines both vote for other parties as well as

non-voting (55.5%). The latter group includes respondents who said they would vote blank, would spoil their vote or would not vote at all if general election were held the following day.¹² Don’t knows, refusals to answer the question and missing answers are excluded from the analysis because substantively these responses do not express sanctioning of incumbents (23.1%).

The results presented in Model 3 in Table 8 above demonstrate once again that changes in the outcome variable do not affect the stability of findings. Dif-ferences in economic effects compared to those in previous models are almost non-existent, with positive economic perceptions endorsing incumbent support and negative ones increasing the likelihood of the voter casting their vote for another party or abstaining from voting entirely. The findings on economic effects remain solid even if we take into account different forms of economic voting.