Gestión y realización de las operaciones

A related question is whether voters are concerned with the broader economy or merely their own personal well-being when they vote economically. As discussed earlier in this chapter, many of the early studies of economic voting used aggregate data to demonstrate a link between economic conditions and voter support for the incumbent government. These early studies typically gave no account of the individual behaviour that gave rise to these large- scale patterns and it fell to later scholars to produce theories to explain these trends. A com- mon assumption was that individuals respond to changes in their own personal conditions. Thus, if many people become worse off, both the government’s vote share and the national measures of economic well-being decline simultaneously. Conversely, if many people become better off, these indicators improve together. This is what is meant by egocentric (or pock- etbook) voting—voters consider only their own personal circumstances, or perhaps those of their friends and family. Although these early studies rarely made explicit an assumption of egocentric voting, it tends to be apparent in their models. For example, Tufte (1978, 127–134) breaks down the vote at the US presidential elections of 1968, 1972 and 1976 by income and family financial situation. Similarly, Bloom and Price (1975, 1243) produced a model in which the short-term variations in voting behaviour are primarily explained by short-term changes in real income. In their influential bookThe American Voter, Campbell et al. (1960) also make the claim that political behaviour, at least in some spheres, can be explained in terms of ‘primitive self-interest’ (205). Again, their analysis focuses on the way that voting behaviour changes in response to changes in personal economic conditions (381–401).

Although egocentric voting was widely assumed, the theory was rarely put to the test. When Fiorina (1978) did test the egocentric voting hypothesis using individual-level survey data, he failed to find support for it. Similarly, in a study of voting in US congressional elec- tions between 1956 and 1976, Kinder and Kiewiet (1979, 521) found little support for the idea that an individual’s vote choice was materially affected by any economic troubles that individual had personally experienced. In order to explain this, and in light of the evidence 1_{It should also be noted that it is not the purpose of this thesis to establish the absolute size of the economic} vote but rather to determine whether economic voting was different during the Great Recession. The substantive results of this thesis should thus be unaffected by any inflation in the estimates of the size of the economic vote owing to an endogeneity effect, unless that effect was itself affected by the recession.

1.3. SOCIOTROPIC VOTING: DO VOTERS ONLY CARE ABOUT THEMSELVES? 17 that a government’s fortunes are tied to the economic conditions it presides over, they the- orises that voters respond more to national economic conditions than to their own personal conditions (524). That is, voters do hold governments to account for the state of the economy but not necessarily for the individual economic events in their own lives. A later study found further evidence for what they refer to as sociotropic voting (Kinder and Kiewiet 1981). Using a panel study of voters at the 1972, 1974 and 1976 US elections (congressional and, other than in 1974, presidential), they once again tested the egocentric voting hypothesis. Again, they found that sociotropic voting better explains their observations than egocentric voting. Al- though they note that presidential elections have often provided more support for egocentric voting than congressional elections (147), they conclude that ‘for presidential voting even more completely than for congressional voting, citizens’ assessments of national economic conditions—their sociotropic judgements—overwhelm economic grievances encountered in private life’ (148).

Although it is used here in contrast with the term egocentric, the term sociotropic does not simply mean altruistic. That would suggest that sociotropic voters act purely in the interests of others and pay no heed to their own interests. Rather, the term was coined to mean ‘taking some account—we needn’t say exactly how much—of other persons’ interests or, if you like, of the collective’s interest’ (Meehl 1977, 14). So, both theories accept that voters heed their own interests to some degree. Sociotropic voters do not necessarily ignore their own interests but they do give some consideration to the interests of others. The key difference between egocentric and sociotropic theories of voting is how the individual voter behaves. According to the egocentric theories, a voter will react to changes in his or her personal conditions. So a voter who loses his or job, for example, will be more likely to vote against the government than one who keeps his or her job, irrespective of the unemployment rate. The sociotropic theories, on the other hand, predict that the voter who just lost his or her job is not much more likely than anyone else to vote against the government but if the unemployment rate goes up then this will mobilise voters, employed or otherwise, to vote against the government.

The sociotropic theory of economic voting was criticised by Kramer (1983), who argued that the evidence offered in support of this theory was insufficient to reject the null hypothesis of egocentric voting. In his view, this evidence is merely a ‘statistical artifact’ (93). Despite these early objections, sociotropic voting has become the consensus position in the literature as the evidence has mounted (Nannestad and Paldam 1994). This consensus appeared to be under threat when Nannestad and Paldam (1995, 1997a) published two studies finding a

stronger egocentric than sociotropic economic voting effect in Denmark. This was so unex- pected that this result has been described as ‘virtually unique in the literature’ (Lewis-Beck, Stubager and Nadeau 2013, 501). Even these findings have been disputed on methodological grounds (Hibbs 1993, 62–63) and several later attempts to replicate this results have reached the contrary conclusion (Borre 1997; Lewis-Beck, Stubager and Nadeau 2013; Stubager et al. 2014). In light of this, it now appears that Denmark is no exception to the usual pattern of sociotropic voting.

Finally, there is also some evidence that the centre of focus for the economic vote may lie somewhere between the individual and the entire nation (Rogers 2014). This idea that voters are ‘communotropic’—mostly concerned with the economic conditions of their own communities—is interesting but has not yet been thoroughly tested in its own right, unlike the sociotropic theory. Furthermore, this approach would pose measurement difficulties, since communotropic economic assessment questions are not currently common in survey instru- ments. Given the considerable body of evidence that has been accumulated in support of the sociotropic hypothesis, this thesis uses a sociotropic theory of economic voting.