Estilo de vida sustentable y conducta ecológica

worsen, that is, there is a mobilisation effect.

and alternatively:

Hypothesis 6.2 Voters are less inclined to vote when they believe that economic conditions will worsen, that is, there is a withdrawal effect.

These hypotheses take a prospective orientation, that is, it is assumed that voters act upon their beliefs about the future course of the economy rather than their judgement about its past performance. This is because, as has been discussed in previous chapters, there is considerably more variance in reported prospective assessments immediately after the crisis than there is in retrospective assessments, which were almost uniformly negative at that time.

The third hypothesis is based on the idea that an economic crisis intensifies economically driven electoral behaviour beyond what would normally be expected, which is one of the motivating ideas behind this thesis. The importance of unusual severity of economic conditions has also been advanced as a key factor in predicting turnout by Martins and Veige (2013). This leads to the hypothesis that:

Hypothesis 6.3 The effect of economic perceptions on turnout was of a greater magnitude or a different sign during the Great Recession than during a period of relatively normal economic conditions.

The null hypothesis then is that the sign and magnitude were the same at both times. It is important to note that this would still allow for a stronger apparent turnout effect during the Great Recession, simply because voters would be expected to have stronger views about the condition of the economy at that time. For this hypothesis to be supported, there would have to be evidence that any observable difference in turnout cannot be explained by a simple linear model.

6.3

Measuring turnout intention

In order to test these hypotheses, the EES survey data is used once again. As in previous chapters, the 2004, 2009 and 2014 waves are compared, so as to be able to contrast beha- viour during the Great Recession and its aftermath with behaviour during relatively normal economic conditions. Compulsory voting is presumed to dampen any abstention effect consid- erably, so this analysis excludes countries where compulsory voting is enforced. This means

that Belgium, Cyprus and Luxembourg are excluded, while Greece is still included because compulsory voting is not enforced there and Switzerland is also included because voting is only compulsory in one canton (Birch 2008, 36). The dependent variable, turnout intention, was measured with the question ‘And if there was a general election tomorrow, which party would you vote for?’2 In the first two waves, this was asked as an open-ended question and no list of options was read out. Those respondents who named a party are coded as having turnout intention and those who said they would not vote, would spoil their vote or would vote blank are coded as having no turnout intention. Unfortunately, in the most recent wave, a list of parties was read out, and this appears to have affected the response. Whereas 89.6 percent and 87.8 percent of voters reported intending to vote in 2004 and 2009 respectively, a full 95.8 percent of voters reported intending to vote in 2014, when refusals are excluded. On the other hand, the proportion of refusals also increased considerably in 2014. Furthermore, it has been known for some time that survey respondents tend to overreport turnout (for example, see Traugott and Katosh 1979). It has also been shown that offering face-saving responses tends to mitigate this tendency (Zeglovits and Kritzinger 2014). Based on these ideas, it was decided to code refusals to answer this question as as non-intention to vote. Although not a perfect solution, this produces a similar turnout intention rate in year, with 72.7 percent, 76.4 percent and 65.9 percent of respondents coded as having turnout intention in 2004, 2009 and 2014 respectively.

These estimated turnout rates are much closer to the actual recorded turnout rates than the implausibly high rates obtained by ignoring refusals. Figure 6.1 shows the average turnout at national elections in the EU since 1990, with the survey years indicated by dashed vertical lines. As the figure shows, the average turnout at national elections in the EU since the year 2000 has been between the mid-sixties and the low-seventies. The estimated turnout rates also lie in this range, although they are still slightly higher than the recorded turnouts in the corresponding years. This remaining discrepancy might result partly from the fact that the vote choice question is hypothetical and therefore not a perfect indicator of what voters would do at an actual election. Moreover, the recorded average turnout for a particular year is of course affected by which countries actually held general elections in that year, as typical turnout rates vary from country to country. It is also likely that the sample is not perfectly random.3 The effects of this are mitigated by including appropriate controls in the model but it means that 2_{This question was worded identically in all three survey waves, except that ‘was’ became ‘were’ in 2014. As} always, the local translations may vary.

6.3. MEASURING TURNOUT INTENTION 151 Figure 6.1: Average turnout at national elections in EU countries

70.0 72.5 75.0 77.5 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

year

EU average turnout

Average turnout at national elections in the European Union (EU-27) by year. The three dashed lines indicate the survey years of 2004, 2009 and 2014. Source: Eurostat

there may be problems in estimating the population turnout rate from this data, which is not the purpose of this chapter anyway. It can also be seen from this figure that turnout has been in decline over the medium term. This decline has been seen across the developed world and has attracted much scholarly attention (see for example Lyons and Alexander 2000; Franklin 2004; Blais 2007, 2013). Its relevance to this chapter is simply that this medium-term decline should be kept in mind when making inferences about any change in the absolute turnout rate across the period 2004–2014.

As was discussed earlier, the variables that are expected to predict turnout are largely the same as those predicting vote choice. The substantive independent variables are party identification and economic assessment. Additionally, whether the voter reported voting at the previous general election is a new independent variable for this chapter. This inclusion is based on the evidence that voting tends to be habitual (Green and Shacar 2000; Plutzer 2002; Coppock and Green 2015), so those who have voted before are more likely to vote again. This variable is measured in the same way as the dependent variable, except that it is based on a question asking voters who they voted for at the preceding general election in their country, rather than a hypothetical election held tomorrow. In addition to these, the same

Figure 6.2: Proportion intending to vote by year and economic assessment 2004 2009 2014 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 prospective retrospective -2 -1 0 1 2 -2 -1 0 1 2 -2 -1 0 1 2

economic assessment

proportion

Proportion of respondents intending to vote according to the respondent’s prospective (first row) and retrospective (second row) economic assessment in each survey year, shown with 95% confidence intervals. Both forms of economic assessment are measured on a five-point scale ranging from₋2, indicating a very negative assessment, to+2, indicating a very positive assessment, with 0 indicating a neutral assessment. Source: EES

control variables are used as in previous chapters. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of how these variables were measured.

The mobilisation and withdrawal hypotheses (Hypotheses 6.1 and 6.2) predict that voters are respectively more or less inclined to vote when they believe that economic conditions are poor. The pattern of responses to the vote intention question suggests that voters were more likely to abstain from voting during the recession than they had been beforehand and that they became even more likely to abstain in the years after the recession. The mean proportion of respondents indicating an intention to vote was 72.7 percent[72.1%, 73.3%]4in 2004, which fell to 67.7 percent[66.7%, 68.0%]in 2009 and 65.9 percent[65.3%, 66.5%]in 2014. These changes are all statistically significant. This decline in turnout intention over the 2004–2014

6.4. AN ECONOMIC MODEL OF TURNOUT 153