scholarly journals When Do Citizens Respond Politically to the Local Economy? Evidence from Registry Data on Local Housing Markets

2019 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 499-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTIN VINÆS LARSEN ◽  
FREDERIK HJORTH ◽  
PETER THISTED DINESEN ◽  
KIM MANNEMAR SØNDERSKOV

Recent studies of economic voting have focused on the role of the local economy, but with inconclusive results. We argue that while local economic conditions affect incumbent support on average, the importance of the local economy varies by citizens’ interactions with it. More recent and frequent encounters with aspects of the local economy make those aspects more salient and, in turn, feature more prominently in evaluations of the incumbent government. We label this process “context priming.” We provide evidence for these propositions by studying local housing markets. Linking granularly detailed data on housing prices from Danish public registries to both precinct-level election returns and an individual-level panel survey, we find that when individuals interact with the housing market, their support for the incumbent government is more responsive to changes in local housing prices. The study thus provides a framework for understanding when citizens respond politically to the local economy.

Author(s):  
Martin Vinæs Larsen

AbstractDoes the importance of the economy change during a government's time in office? Governments arguably become more responsible for current economic conditions as their tenure progresses. This might lead voters to hold experienced governments more accountable for economic conditions. However, voters also accumulate information about governments' competence over time. If voters are Bayesian learners, then this growing stock of information should crowd out the importance of current economic conditions. This article explores these divergent predictions about the relationship between tenure and the economic vote using three datasets. First, using country-level data from a diverse set of elections, the study finds that support for more experienced governments is less dependent on economic growth. Secondly, using individual-level data from sixty election surveys covering ten countries, the article shows that voters' perceptions of the economy have a greater impact on government support when the government is inexperienced. Finally, the article examines a municipal reform in Denmark that assigned some voters to new local incumbents and finds that these voters responded more strongly to the local economy. In conclusion, all three studies point in the same direction: economic voting decreases with time in office.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Woo Chang Kang

AbstractRegional bloc voting in South Korea has been ascribed to voters’ psychological attachments to birthplace. This article seeks to expand the existing discussion of regionalism by showing that economic conditions in voters’ places of residence affect vote choices at the individual level and produce clustering of votes at the aggregate level in South Korea. While the idea of residence-based regionalism has previously been suggested, empirical scrutiny of the idea has been limited. Exploiting a Bayesian multilevel strategy, this article provides evidence that short-term economic changes at the province level affected voters’ choices in the 2007 presidential election in South Korea, independent of the long-term political affiliation between regional parties and their constituents. The positive association between local economic conditions and vote choices remains significant, controlling for perceptions of national economic conditions and other individual level covariates such as age and political attitudes.


Author(s):  
N. S. Motorova

The article describes the structure and powers of the provincial government in the implementation of the main directions of state social policy. It was noted that on theterritoryofBelarusthey played a major role in solving the social problems of the population due to the lack of zemstvos. The outdated legal framework and the lack of a clear division of functions hampered their effectiveness.In the mid 1880s regulatory committees were established in the structure of the provincial institutions. On the territory of the Belarusian provinces they played an important role in the implementation of social policy, as they controlled the financing of the rural­medical part and partly public charity. However, the experience of the activities of the regulatory committees was unsatisfactory. In this regard, at the end of the XIX century the Interior Ministry proposed to eliminate them, as well as to abolish the provincial food commissions and departments of public charity. It was planned to transfer their functions to the zemstvos. This proposal was implemented partially, as a result of the introduction of the institutions of local economy in theVitebsk,MinskandMogilevprovinces in 1903.At the end of the XIX century in the structure of the provincial administration ofBelaruswere created the offices which were entrusted with the functions of monitoring compliance with the workers’ legislation, and then the insurance of workers. They were formed under the influence of new social demands. These offices corresponded to new social and economic conditions, in contrast to the provincial institutions, which managed public charity, national food and health care.


2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 799-823 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergi Pardos-Prado ◽  
Iñaki Sagarzazu

Classic and revisionist perspectives on economic voting have thoroughly analyzed the role of macroeconomic indicators and individual partisanship as determinants of subjective evaluations of the national economy. Surprisingly, however, top-down analysis of parties’ capacity to cue and persuade voters about national economic conditions is absent in the debate. This study uses a novel dataset containing monthly economic salience in party parliamentary speeches, macroeconomic indicators and individual survey data covering the four last electoral cycles in Spain (1996–2011). The results show that the salience of economic issues in the challenger’s discourse substantially increases negative evaluations of performance when this challenger is the owner of the economic issue. While a challenger’s conditioning of public economic evaluations is independent of the state of the economy (and can affect citizens with different ideological orientations), incumbent parties are more constrained by the true state of the economy in their ability to persuade the electorate on this issue.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 272-289
Author(s):  
Hui Bai ◽  
Christopher M. Federico

While many studies have investigated what predicts citizens’ vote preferences, less is known about what predicts change in citizens’ vote preferences over time. This paper focuses on the role of judgments about national economy in the recent past (i.e., “sociotropic economic retrospections”). Two longitudinal studies show that sociotropic economic retrospections (along with partisanship, ideology, and whether incumbent is running for re-election) at a given time point predict within-person changes in vote choice over time. Furthermore, cross-lagged panel analyses found that sociotropic economic retrospections and political preferences may have reciprocal effects on each other. Together, these results illustrate the temporal dimension of economic voting by suggesting that sociotropic economic retrospections not only predict votes at single points in time, but also individual-level shifts in vote preference over time. As such, the association between sociotropic economic retrospections and vote preference is more dynamic than past literature suggests.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1532673X2110532
Author(s):  
Isabel Inguanzo ◽  
Araceli Mateos ◽  
Homero Gil de Zúñiga

Prior research on individual-level drivers of protest has primarily focused on legal protest. However, less is known about what makes people engage in unlawful protest activities. Building upon previous literature on the collective action dilemma, socialization on violent and high-risk social movements, and political psychology, we expect that illegal protest frequency varies at different levels of authoritarianism. We explore the relationship between authoritarian values and illegal protest by analyzing a two-wave panel survey data gathered in the US. The results of cross-sectional, lagged, and autoregressive ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models show that when controlling for legal protest and other relevant variables in protest behavior, authoritarianism predicts illegal protest following an inverted U-shaped relationship. In other words, average levels of authoritarianism predict more frequent engagement in illegal protest, while this frequency decreases as approaching the poles of the authoritarianism scale.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 473-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Holbrook

The idea that economic conditions influence election outcomes and voting behavior is hardly novel and would appear to be close to uniformly accepted, especially in the case of American presidential elections. Beginning with the early aggregate studies (Arcelus and Meltzer 1975; Bloom and Price 1975; Kramer 1971; Tufte 1978) and the important individual-level work that followed soon thereafter (Kiewiet 1983; Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981; Fiorina 1981), election scholars have devoted considerable attention to the influence of the economy on voting behavior and election outcomes. Although the findings are many and sometimes disparate, a few general conclusions have emerged: economic voting is incumbency oriented rather than policy oriented (Fiorina 1981; Kiewiet 1983); at the individual level, evaluations of the national economy are more closely tied to vote choice than are evaluations of personal finances (Kiewiet 1983; Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981; Kinder, Adams, and Gronke 1989); and, with the exception of 2000, the incumbent party is habitually returned to office when economic times are good and tossed out when economic times are bad (Campbell and Garand 2000). In short, we know a lot about how the economy influences voters and elections, and it would seem that there are few issues left to resolve.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1532673X2110056
Author(s):  
Manuel E. Lago ◽  
Ignacio Lago

This article examines whether household size affects economic voting. We argue when individuals are asked about national economic conditions and their personal financial situation that moderate or mid-range responses are more likely in multi-person households than in one-person households. The aggregation of personal economic evaluations within households reduces the variation in economic opinions across household members. As a result, it is harder for an individual to say that the national economic conditions and her personal financial situation are good or bad as the number of household members increases. Using individual-level data from the American National Election Studies from 1966 to 2016, the authors find that both evaluations of the national economy and personal economic conditions are endogenous to household size. The aggregate, state-level evidence from five presidential elections in the U.S. shows that the impact of the economy on the incumbent support increases the larger the number of one-person households.


Author(s):  
Zhenyu Gao ◽  
Michael Sockin ◽  
Wei Xiong

Abstract We develop a model to analyze information aggregation and learning in housing markets. Households enter a neighborhood by buying houses and consuming each other’s final goods. In the presence of pervasive informational frictions, housing prices serve as important signals to households and capital producers about the neighborhood’s economic strength. Our model provides a novel amplification mechanism in which noise from housing markets propagates throughout the local economy via learning because of the complementarity in households’ decisions, distorting migration into the neighborhood and the supply of capital and labor. We provide consistent evidence based on the recent U.S. housing cycle.


2011 ◽  
pp. 46-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Polishchuk ◽  
R. Menyashev

The paper deals with economics of social capital which is defined as the capacity of society for collective action in pursuit of common good. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between social capital and formal institutions, and the impact of social capital on government efficiency. Structure of social capital and the dichotomy between its bonding and bridging forms are analyzed. Social capital measurement, its economic payoff, and transmission channels between social capital and economic outcomes are discussed. In the concluding section of the paper we summarize the results of our analysis of the role of social capital in economic conditions and welfare of Russian cities.


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