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The basic idea behind economic voting theory is that voters are more likely to support in- cumbents when the economy is performing satisfactorily than they are when it is performing poorly. This basic idea is simple but there are many different theoretical behaviour models that could support this idea. This chapter has reviewed the key theoretical debates in the economic voting literature and discussed the empirical evidence in support of the various positions. Al- though some of these questions are more settled than others, it is not possible to proceed without making some assumptions about the nature of the economic vote. This theoretical model is a selection model, which means that it is assumed that voters use their votes in order to select the best possible government rather than to send a reward or punishment signal to the incumbent. The assumption that voters are not entirely egocentric but rather sociotropic economic voters is probably the least controversial, in light of the large body of evidence that sociotropic economic voting exists. This thesis is based on a prospective theory of economic voting. This is partly for data reasons, as the next chapter will show. Although retrospective

1.10. CONCLUSION 37

Figure 1.2: Outline of economic voting theory

This illustrates the specific theory of economic voting used in this thesis. A voter’s level of support for a particular party is influenced by his or her perceptions of the economy and the direction of this influence depends on whether that party is incumbent or not. The strength of this economic vote is in turn influenced by contextual factors such as clarity of responsibility and the Great Recession.

Figure 1.3: Vote choice process

Vote choice is not modelled as being directly influenced by the economic vote. Rather, the economic vote independently affects a voter’s level of support for each party and these levels of support determine the final vote choice.

studies tend to predominate, the empirical evidence does not strongly favour either altern- ative. This thesis prefers an economic perceptions model over an objective indicators model because, despite the criticisms of perceptions models, individual voters are not necessarily ob- jective and do filter information in idiosyncratic ways. In light of the fact that almost all of the countries under study have multiparty systems, a party support model is preferred to a vote choice model. Finally, it is theorised that the strength of the economic vote may be affected by contextual features such as clarity of responsibility or the Great Recession, as an example of a deep international economic crisis.

Taken together, these features describe a cohesive theory of the economic vote, which is outlined in Figure 1.2. As the diagram shows, the level of support that a particular voter has for a particular party is influenced by both the prospective economic assessment of that voter and the incumbency status of the party—which may have more than two levels if importance within the governing coalition is taken into account. These two influences interact with each other, as the effect of a particular economic assessment on support for a government party is expected to be different from the same effect on support for an opposition party. It is this interaction of effects that is referred to as the economic vote. It is worth noting that, although the basic principle of economic voting appears straightforward, even obvious, it necessarily describes an interaction effect.7 This explains some of the complexity of economic voting models, including those introduced later in this thesis. This economic voting effect is itself affected by contextual factors, such as the clarity of responsibility in a particular country and events such as the Great Recession. It is of course the latter that is the focus of this thesis, the primary objective of which is to establish whether that recession did indeed have an effect on the economic vote. Figure 1.3 illustrates that a citizen’s final vote choice is determined by his or her level of support for each of the parties that could potentially receive the vote. It is assumed that voters simply select the party that they currently support the most.

This chapter has also discussed the existing literature on economic voting in the Great Recession. Although there have been a number of studies of economic voting in individual countries during that time frame as well as a handful of aggregate-data cross-national studies, there are limits to what can be learned from these. Even among these studies, few explicitly contrast what was observed during the crisis to what was observed at other times. In order to gain a fuller understanding of how the economic vote was affected by the Great Recession, 7_{Except in the special case of a two-party system, where support for the government and support for the oppos-} ition can be reduced to a single difference in support variable and the incumbency effect can be eliminated entirely. This special case describes the United States but is otherwise rare, especially among the European countries studied in this thesis.

1.10. CONCLUSION 39 there is a need for an individual-level cross-national study comparing the economic vote be- fore, during and after the crisis. This thesis fills this need. The next chapter discusses the data used to undertake this study as well as the specific methods used to analyse that data.

Chapter 2

Measuring the economic vote

The previous chapter introduced the theory of economic voting and explained the specific theoretical framework that informs this thesis. The following chapters use this framework to develop statistical models describing the economic vote, which are then used to test hypotheses that shed light on the research questions driving this thesis. The purpose of this chapter is to prepare the ground for these statistical models by describing the data sources that are used, the key variables that are analysed and the methods that are used to perform this analysis. This chapter focuses on the details that are relevant for the entire thesis. Other details that are more specific to individual analyses are discussed as needed in the chapters where they are relevant.

As the purpose of this thesis is to examine whether and how economic voting behaviour was affected by the Great Recession, it is important to be able to measure the economic vote both during the crisis and at other times. As will be shown, it happens that the European Election Studies have conducted multinational voter surveys at ideal times for making such a comparison. These surveys include questions that indicate respondents’ levels of support for various parties as well as their economic assessments. When combined with incumbency data from other sources, this makes it possible to model the economic vote according to the framework introduced in the previous chapter. It will also be shown that there is a structure to this data, which has to be taken into account by the statistical methods used. This structure is accounted for by using multilevel analysis.

This chapter begins by introducing the data sources that have been used, and shows how the timing of the three survey waves used coincides with the course of the Great Recession. Following this, there is a discussion of the particular measurements used. This includes a description of the key variables and the precise question wording where appropriate, along with some comments on the distribution and level of measurement. Finally, the methods used to analyse all of this data are introduced and the reasons behind these choices are given.

2.1

Data sources and timing

As the previous chapter explained, this study is intended to be an individual-level cross- national study comparing the economic vote before, during and after the Great Recession. In order to achieve these goals, there is a need for survey data satisfying three key criteria: it must include the necessary questions to measure the economic vote, it must be compar- able across nations and it must consist of appropriately timed survey waves. Fortunately, the European Election Studies satisfy all three of the requirements.1 The EES surveys are a series of post-election surveys, which are collected in each European Union member state shortly after every European Parliament election. As will be seen later in this chapter, these surveys in- clude the required questions. These surveys are specifically designed to be comparable across countries. They are based on a single questionnaire which is translated into the appropriate local language or languages. It should be noted that this is not a study of European Parliament elections but rather of hypothetical national elections. The advantage of this approach is that it makes it possible to measure the economic voting tendency across all of the countries at the same point in time, whereas the actual national elections are invariably spread out across many years, which makes it very difficult to compare countries. Although the EES surveys cor- respond to European Parliament elections, they also include questions about national politics and these are the questions that are used.

The EES surveys are also suitably timed. This thesis uses the 2004, 2009, and 2014 waves (EES 2004, 2009, 2014; Schmitt et al. 2009; van Egmond et al. 2010; Popa et al. 2015), which were all conducted shortly after the European Parliament elections in those years. Figure 2.1 shows the quarterly GDP growth rate across the current 28 member states of the EU. The Great Recession began in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and by the end of 2008 the EU was in recession, following the common definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. The dashed vertical lines show when the European Parliament elections occurred and correspondingly when the three EES surveys were collected. As the figure shows, the 2004 election took place well before there was any sign of crisis, while the 2009 election took place shortly after its peak. Although there was a brief apparent recovery, conditions worsened again in 2011, with a further recovery in 2013. By the time of the 2014 European Parliament elections, the EU had been out of recession for eighteen 1_{The survey data used in this thesis was originally collected by the 2004, 2009 and 2014 EES research groups.} Those studies have been made possible by various grants. Neither the original collectors of the data nor their sponsors bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations made here. The data is available from the home page of the European Election Study (http://eeshomepage.net/) and from the Archive Department of GESIS– Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (http://www.gesis.org/).

2.1. DATA SOURCES AND TIMING 43 Figure 2.1: GDP growth in the European Union, 2000–2015

-2.5 -2.0 -1.5 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015

time

GDP growth (%)

This shows the seasonally adjusted GDP growth rate across the entire 28-country European Union by quarter, each compared to the previous quarter. The dashed vertical lines show when the European Parliament elections took place in 2004, 2009 and 2015. Source: OECD

months. These three time points thus offer a before, during and after snapshot of the Great Recession. It should be noted that this is the overall picture, as the recession took a slightly different course in each country. Nonetheless, the only two EU member states to avoid the recession altogether were Poland and Slovakia.

The EES surveys typically encompass each member state of the EU. The EU was enlarged during the time frame of this study, with Bulgaria and Romania joining in 2009 and Croatia joining in 2014. Since it would be difficult to separate any Great Recession effect from that of joining the EU, these countries have been excluded from this study. This leaves the 25 countries that have been member states since 2004.2 The political parties included in the study are those for which there is a measure of the dependent variable, party support. These are the parties that were chosen by the EES coordinators in each country as being the most important parties in that country. These typically include all of the parties that could reasonably expect 2_{Unless otherwise specified, the Swedish data from 2004 has been excluded from the analysis. This is because} some variables were measured on a different scale from that used elsewhere. Most problematically, this includes the economic assessment questions, which were measured on a three-point scale instead of a five-point scale. Since these responses could not be reconciled satisfactorily with those from other countries, the decision was made to ignore the Swedish survey in that year. Sweden is however still included in the other years. Also, whenever party support is the dependent variable, Belgium, Lithuania and Luxembourg in 2004 also had to be excluded because the party-specific questions were not asked in those countries.

Table 2.1: Sample size and interview mode of EES surveys

2004 2009 2014

Country Sample Mode Sample Mode Sample Mode

Austria 1010 phone 1000 phone 1114 face

Belgium 889 mail 1002 phone 1084 face

Cyprus 500 face 1000 phone 530 face

Czech Republic 889 face 301/720 phone/face 1177 face

Denmark 1317 phone 1000 phone 1085 face

Estonia 1606 face 300/707 phone/face 1087 face

Finland 900 phone 1000 phone 1096 face

France 1406 unknown 1000 phone 1074 face

Germany 596 phone 1004 phone 1648 face

Greece 500 phone 1000 phone 1085 face

Hungary 1200 face 300/705 phone/face 1104 face

Ireland 1154 mail 1001 phone 1081 face

Italy 1553 mail 1000 phone 1091 face

Latvia 1000 face 300/701 phone/face 1055 face

Lithuania 1005 face 300/705 phone/face 1096 face

Luxembourg 1335 phone 1001 phone 538 face

Malta — — 1000 phone 544 face

Netherlands 1586 mail 1005 phone 1101 face

Poland 960 face 302/700 phone/face 1223 face

Portugal 1000 phone 1000 phone 1033 face

Slovakia 1063 face 301/715 phone/face 1095 face

Slovenia 1002 phone 1000 phone 1143 face

Spain 1208 face 1000 phone 1106 face

Sweden 2100 face 1002 phone 1144 face

United Kingdom 1500 phone 1000 phone 1421 face

The 2004 wave used telephone, mailback and face-to-face interviews, depending on the coun- try. The 2009 wave used telephone interviews in every country, which were supplemented by face-to-face interviews in certain countries. All interviews in the 2014 wave were conducted face-to-face. Source: EES

to win a seat at a general election. Table 2.1 shows the sample size and interview mode of each survey in each of the three waves. At least five hundred responses have been collected in each country and one thousand responses is typical, except for some particularly small countries. Malta was not surveyed at all in 2004. Various interview modes have been used, with telephone and face-to-face modes the most common. A mix of modes was used in 2004, including mailback surveys in four countries. It is not known which method was used in France in that year.3 Interviews were predominately conducted by telephone in 2009 but these were supplemented with face-to-face interviews in several countries where a representative sample could not be otherwise obtained (van Egmond et al. 2010, 5). All interviews were face-to- face in the 2014 wave. Although there are a mix of modes in this data, mode effects are not 3_{The codebook simply states that ‘France did not report the technical implementation of its study’ (Schmitt} et al. 2009).

2.1. DATA SOURCES AND TIMING 45 expected to influence the findings, since economic voting is not something that respondents might be embarrassed to admit. In fact, it cannot be determined if any individual respondent is an economic voter since these patterns are only observable in the aggregate.

Although the EES survey data forms the primary dataset for this thesis, some contextual data has been drawn from other sources. The main contextual information required is the incumbency status of each party at the time the surveys were collected. This information was taken from the Parliaments and Governments Database (Döring and Manow 2015), also known as ParlGov, which aggregates information about election results and parliament and cabinet composition from EU and other countries. Since multiple governments may be in power in a country during a single calendar year, it was necessary to decide precisely which dates to use to measure incumbency. In most cases, the measurement date chosen was the first day of the survey fieldwork, namely 14 June 2004, 8 June 2009 and 22 May 2014. Whichever party held the post of head of government on this date is designated the prime minister’s party4 in that year. Parties holding other positions in the government are designated cabinet parties.5 All other parties are coded as opposition parties. This approach makes sense because survey respondents were asked to reflect on the government currently in power at the time.

In two cases, however, slight adjustments were made in order to accommodate the peculiar circumstances. On 7 May 2009, the Czech government was replaced by a nonpartisan care- taker government, in advance of elections in October of that year (Linek and Lacina 2010). Since this caretaker government was not officially associated with any particular parties, it is treated in this thesis as an extension of the preceding coalition government led by the Civic Democratic Party. Similarly, the Prime Minister of Hungary Ferenc Gyurcsány resigned from the minority Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) government on 21 March 2009, being replaced by Gordon Bajnai on 14 April (Várnagy 2010). Although he was an MSZP appointment and a government minister, Bajnai was a compromise candidate proposed to appease other parties, and he is recorded as a nonpartisan prime minister in the ParlGov database. In light of these circumstances, this thesis treats the MSZP as the party holding the office of prime minister at the time of the 2009 surveys. Other cases worth special mention are Luxembourg in 2004 and 2009 and Belgium in 2014. In these instances, the national elections coincided with the 4_{This also includes the party holding the presidency of Cyprus, which is the only EU country with a full pres-} idential system. Since the phrase ‘party of the head of government’ is rather unwieldy, the term ‘prime minister’s party’ is used throughout this thesis instead and should be understood to include the party of the President of Cyprus.

5_{Note that in some countries, the official cabinet does not include all government ministers. The term is not} used here to refer to such an inner cabinet but rather to all government ministers, irrespective of seniority. This usage applies throughout this thesis.

European Parliament elections, so there was the potential for a change of government to have occurred during the survey fieldwork, which would have been problematic. In practice this was not an issue, as both Luxembourg elections led to only minor changes to the cabinet, which in any case did not take place until after the fieldwork period (Dumont and Poirier 2005; Dumont, Kies and Poirier 2010), and the Belgian election did not result in any change to the party composition of the cabinet (Rihoux et al. 2015). The full list of parties analysed in their thesis along with their incumbency status in each year can be found in Appendix A.