Controlador de la capa lógica de negocio

‘everyone else whose decisions might impact the economy, including individuals, firms, in- terest groups, nonelectorally dependent (entrenched) bureaucrats, foreign leaders, the WTO, and many more’ (139–140). The argument is that in contexts where economic decisions are largely driven by elected officials or bureaucrats responsible to them, a high proportion of economic shocks will be competency shocks and the economic vote will be correspondingly high. By contrast, in contexts where many economic decisions are made by statutory bodies or international agencies or are otherwise outside of the control of the incumbent government, the economic vote will be considerably lower. There are some similarities with the clarity of responsibility theory, in that both theories relate the strength of the economic vote to polit- ical control but there are importance differences. Clarity of responsibility theory is concerned with the degree to which the dominant government party has to negotiate with other parties to implement government policy, whereas this theory is concerned with the degree to which economic policy is influenced by non-political actors. Although this is a promising theory, it is not used by this thesis, mainly because it is based on some of the opposite assumptions from those made here. For example, theirs is a retrospective vote choice theory, whereas this thesis is based on a prospective party support theory.

1.9

The Great Recession

The central question motivating this thesis is whether the Great Recession affected the eco- nomic vote in the European Union. Of course, classic economic voting theory already predicts a strong electoral response, since the recession was both widespread and severe. The ques- tion is whether the strength of the economic vote exceeded this expectation. There are two threads in the literature that suggest that this might be the case. The first thread is the idea of grievance asymmetry, which claims that the response to a good event is not necessarily of the same magnitude as the response to a bad event. It is typically argued that the response to a negative stimulus is stronger than the response to a positive one. This argument appeared as early as Campbell et al. (1960, 555), who wrote:

Compare the change wrought in party fortunes in either of these cases[the panic of 1893 and the Great Depression]with the change occurring when a party already in office witnesses a surge of economic prosperity. This prosperity clearly benefits the administration party, but it has nothing like the magnitude of the effect that

would result from economic distress. A party already in power is rewarded much less for good times than it is punished for bad times.

This idea was tested by Bloom and Price (1975), who extended previous economic voting models to account for this possibility. In an aggregate study of US House of Representat- ives elections, they found that recessions were associated with reduced incumbent support but that the opposite was not true for economic recoveries. Similar results have occasionally been found elsewhere. For example, a grievance asymmetry was also found at Danish elec- tions between 1985–92 using an individual-level model (Nannestad and Paldam 1997b) and a study of Hungarian voters in 1997 found a similar effect (Duch 2001). Looking beyond studies of economic voting specifically, it has also been found that the media and public opin- ion response to negative economic news is stronger than the response to positive economic developments (Soroka 2006). What these findings suggest is that economic voting is weaker than expected during times of prosperity. It is not therefore too much of a stretch to hypothes- ise that economic voting might be stronger than expected during a recession of exceptional severity.

The second relevant thread in the literature pertains to the salience of economic issues. The argument is that voters are more likely to vote economically when the economy is a sa- lient issue for some reason and that the salience of economic issues is linked to economic performance. Consequently, economic voting is expected to recede when the economy is per- forming satisfactorily. Duch and Stevenson (2008, 171) summarise the argument thus: ‘when the economy is in equilibrium, or possibly even out of equilibrium but in a positive direc- tion, economic evaluations are likely to play a much less important role in the vote decision.’ This idea has some empirical support, with survey data from the 2008 US presidential elec- tion (Singer 2011a) and cross-national survey data from 38 countries in the years 2001–2006 (Singer 2011b) showing that the salience of the economy is greater in contexts where eco- nomic conditions are poor and among individuals who are personally affected by economic privations. A follow-up study using aggregated survey data from elections in 43 countries in the years 2001–2011 found further evidence that economic issues tend to be most salient when the economy is less healthy (Singer 2013). It is interesting that the implications of the asymmetry and salience arguments are so similar despite the differences in logic. Whether it results from qualitative differences in the way people respond to different kinds of informa- tion or from the fluctuating salience of economic issues, these literatures predict a stronger economic vote during bad times than good times. This leaves open the possibility that a severe

1.9. THE GREAT RECESSION 33 global recession ought to produce a still stronger economic vote, beyond that which would be predicted by classical economic voting theory.

The handful of comparative studies that have been published are largely based on aggreg- ate data, which is probably because comparable aggregate data is more quickly available than cross-national survey data. Several studies investigated the relationship between government vote share and economic indicators. One study of EU countries in 2008–2011, which also included aggregated perceptions data, found evidence of an economic voting effect during the crisis, noting that most incumbents lost support, but their study design does not include a baseline for comparison so it is not clear whether this economic vote is stronger or weaker than expected (LeDuc and Pammett 2013). Similarly, a study of elections in 28 OECD countries in the years 2007–2011 found clear evidence of an economic voting effect during the crisis, but once again there is no baseline to compare this to (Bartels 2014). Other studies did compare Great Recession voting behaviour to an earlier baseline. Hernández and Kriesi (2015) looked at the relationship between economic indicators and the vote share of the dominant governing party at post-crisis elections in 30 European countries. They found different patterns in dif- ferent parts of the continent, with an economic vote typically exceeding baseline expectations in Western European countries but not in Central and Eastern European countries, where the response appeared to be more moderate. Likewise, Bouvet and King (2016) investigated the relationship between incumbent vote share and economic indicators in 32 OECD countries at elections between 1975 and 2013, with particular attention paid to the Great Recession. They found evidence that voters were more likely to punish right-wing parties than left-wing parties during the recession. A further study looked at economic opinion in eleven Western European countries in the period 2007–2011, finding that economic opinion typically reflected the eco- nomic reality and that the perceptions of voters during the Great Recession were by and large not an overreaction (Anderson and Hecht 2014).

In the few years since the Great Recession, a literature has emerged on economic voting during that time. The bulk of these have been studies of individual countries. Many of these studies seek to establish whether there was an economic voting effect in some country during the Great Recession. For example, a crisis economic voting effect was found in the United King- dom, as well as qualified support for austerity policies, with evidence that this support is likely to wane unless the economy starts to improve (Borges et al. 2013). A study of British voters’ attributions of responsibility for the crisis found evidence that Conservative partisans were more likely to blame the government for the crisis compared to Labour partisans, who tended

to blame financial institutions (Hellwig and Coffey 2011). There is also evidence that Labour Party support in the years 2004–2009 was more related to unemployment among low income earners and to inflation among high income earners (Palmer and Whitten 2011; Palmer, Whit- ten and Williams 2013). On the other hand, Duch and Sagarzazu (2014) used panel studies from the UK and Germany to study perceptions of the Great Recession and economic voting, finding little difference in the economic vote of rich and poor voters, despite poorer voters feeling the effects of the recession more strongly. There is thus agreement that economic vot- ing occurred in the UK during the crisis but not as to whether rich and poor voters behaved differently.

Countries that were particularly heavily affected by the recession have tended to attract scholarly attention. Unsurprisingly, economic voting appears to have been a feature of elec- tions in these countries as well. For example, a Greek study used a combination of individual and aggregate data to examine the economic vote in Greece both before and during the Great Recession (Nezi 2012), finding evidence of economic voting throughout the crisis, although a large shift in economic perceptions is necessary to produce a change in government. Turning to Spain, Fraile and Lewis-Beck (2012) use survey data from 1982 to 2008 to show that eco- nomic voting does exist in that country, despite some contrary claims in the literature. In a later study, they then look at the 2008 election specifically, finding a clear economic voting effect during the economic crisis, although they unfortunately do not compare 2008 directly with previous years (Fraile and Lewis-Beck 2013). A study of post-election surveys from Italian elections between 1990 and 2008 found that instability is not an inherent characteristic of Italian politics but rather the result of valence political behaviour such as economic voting (Bellucci 2012). And Marsh and Mikhaylov (2012) examined the 2011 Irish election, which is particularly notable for the extreme loss of support of the previously highly successful incum- bent party Fianna Fáil. While they naturally place importance on the specific circumstances of the crisis and its aftermath, they unsurprisingly find support for a link between the economic and political events of that time.

Economic voting is certainly not limited to those countries that suffered exceptionally from the recession. Germany is a particularly interesting case because it was governed by a grand coalition of the major centre-left and centre-right parties at the time of the recession, so eco- nomic voters potentially had a much more difficult to choice to make. In other words, despite the severe economic crisis, there was no viable alternative to the incumbent government. An- derson and Hecht (2012) used panel survey data from before and after the 2009 German

1.9. THE GREAT RECESSION 35 elections to examine the economic vote in this context, finding that voters personally affected by the recession used several strategies to shift their support away from the parties of the grand coalition but that sociotropic voters tended not to continue supporting the coalition. Clarke and Whitten (2013) used survey data of Germans in 2009 to compare valence mod- els, which are a generalisation of economic voting models, to spatial models, finding that the valence model was best equipped to explain vote choice. These results suggest that, despite being governed by a grand coalition, economic voting still occurred in Germany during the re- cession. Economic voting effects during the Great Recession have also been found in Sweden (Martinsson 2013; Lindvall, Martinsson and Oscarsson 2013), Portugal (Freire and Santana- Pereira 2012), Turkey (Çarko˘glu 2012) and Hungary (Stegmaier and Lewis-Beck 2011).

Although this literature clearly establishes that economic voting during the Great Reces- sion took place across many and varied European countries, there are two things that are missing. The first of these is a comparative, individual-level study of economic voting beha- viour during the crisis. This is important because there is only so much that can be learnt from single-country and aggregate studies. Single-country studies are limited because they cannot possibly test or control for contextual effects, such as clarity of responsibility. Moreover, when looking at only one country, there is always the possibility, however remote, that any effect that is found is not a typical behaviour but one characteristic to the particular institutions of that country. Even though economic voting effects have been found in so many individual European countries, it is not yet clear whether these effects are similar in size, since each study uses different data and different methods. Aggregate studies are also limited because there are so many different individual behaviours that can explain any observable aggregate effect. Therefore, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the economic vote during this crisis, a comparative individual-level study is needed. The published study that comes closest to meeting these criteria is Whiteley (2016), who used European Social Surveys data to compare voters from 21 countries in 2006 and 2012, in other words shortly before and shortly after the crisis. He modelled incumbent support according to spatial, valence and cleavages theories of voter behaviour, finding more similarities than differences before and after the crisis in each case. This was not, however, a study of economic voting specifically and leaves open questions about the nature and level of economic voting during the crisis.

The second thing missing from this literature is a study specifically designed to contrast the economic vote before, during and after the recession. This is important because such a study would make it possible to test the hypothesis that the economic vote was stronger than

expected during the crisis. Without a time comparison, the possibility cannot be excluded that the economic vote seen during the crisis was simply a continuation of the normal economic voting response that is seen at other times. There have been a small number of single-country studies that have specifically made this comparison but no comparative studies. For example, Martinsson (2013) found that the economic vote in Sweden was unusually strong at the post- crisis 2010 election and Lindvall, Martinsson and Oscarsson (2013) compared the economic vote in Sweden during the Great Recession to that during an earlier crisis in 1991–1993, finding that economic status was a stronger predictor of economic voting behaviour during the Great Recession than it had been during the earlier crisis. On the other hand, Freire and Santana-Pereira (2012) found the economic vote in Portugal to be slightly depressed at the 2009 elections compared to previous years and Çarko˘glu (2012) found a stronger economic vote in Turkey in 2007 than in 2011. Others still have argued that the immediate economic voting response to the recession was muted and that it was not until the implementation of unpopular austerity programmes that voters started to turn against their governments (Bermeo and Bartels 2014, 3–4). In the face of such contradictory results, there is a need for a systematic cross-national individual-level study designed to compare the economic vote before, during and after the Great Recession, a need which this thesis fills.