Economic interventions, economic perceptions and political support during the Eurozone crisis

What is the effect of external economic intervention on political support and economic evaluations? We argue that economic interventions systematically worsen support for governing institutions and much of this is mediated through updating economic perceptions, at least during the Eurozone crisis. We evidence this with two analyses. First, we provide the first quasi-experimental evidence to show that intervention worsened both political support and economic evaluations. Second, we conduct a mediation analysis using Eurobarometer data to quantify how much of the effect of intervention is mediated by economic evaluations. This has broader implications for understanding how citizens react to international integration, international cues, and the process of forming judgements of political support.

Cognitive Political Economy: A Growing Partisan Divide in Economic Perceptions

Research suggests that American partisans are increasingly distinct in their beliefs. These strengthened partisan feelings extend to economic perceptions—as numerous scholars have shown, there is a substantial gap between the proportion of Democrats and the proportion of Republicans that believe the economy is improving. Here, we examine the extent to which these perceptions have polarized over the past two decades and the degree to which they still respond to objective economic indicators. Exploiting a Gallup time-series, we show that the gap in economic perceptions approximately doubled between 1999 and 2020, and that partisan economic perceptions no longer seem to converge during economic crises. We further demonstrate that the economic perceptions of Democrats and Republicans have polarized relative to Independents and that this polarization is not asymmetric in magnitude. Collectively, these results document the extraordinary rise of perceptual polarization and illustrate that neither Democrats nor Republicans are immune to its effects.

A tale of two peoples: motivated reasoning in the aftermath of the Brexit Vote

Partisanship is a powerful driver of economic perceptions. Yet we know less about whether other political divisions may lead to similar evaluative biases. In this paper, we explore how the salient divide between “Remainers” and “Leavers” in the UK in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum has given rise to biased economic perceptions. In line with the cognitive dissonance framework, we argue that salient non-partisan divisions can change economic perceptions by triggering processes of self- and in-group justification. Using both nationally-representative observational and experimental survey data, we demonstrate that the perceptions of the economy are shaped by the Brexit divide and that these biases are exacerbated when respondents are reminded of Brexit. These findings indicate that perceptual biases are not always rooted in partisanship, but can be triggered by other political divisions.

Economic perceptions and voting behavior in US presidential elections

The economic voting literature disagrees over the exogeneity of economic perceptions on individual electoral behavior. One side argues that economic perceptions are driven by partisan dispositions, which then calls into question the substantive importance of this factor in assessing electoral behavior. A second side argues that voters rationally assess the economy and accurately use this information to inform their electoral behavior. This article addresses this disagreement by disentangling economic perceptions from partisan dispositions. Using data from the American National Election Study from 1968 to 2016, we link objective macroeconomic indicators to individual economic perceptions, and then assess its explanatory power on vote choice in US presidential elections. The results indicate that objective economic perceptions have a substantive impact on support for incumbent candidates. Moreover, the estimated effect sizes are consistent with previous research estimating the relative importance of party identification and economic perceptions on vote choice.

The Popularity of Authoritarian Leaders

ABSTRACTHow do citizens in authoritarian states feel about their leaders? While some dictators rule through terror, others seem genuinely popular. Using the Gallup World Poll’s panel of more than one hundred-forty countries in 2006–2016, the authors show that the drivers of political approval differ across regime types. Although brutal repression in overt dictatorships could cause respondents to falsify their preferences, in milder informational autocracies, greater repression actually predicts lower approval. In autocracies as in democracies, economic performance matters and citizens’ economic perceptions, while not perfectly accurate, track objective indicators. Dictators also benefit from greater perceived public safety, but the authors find no such effect in democracies. Covert censorship of the media and the Internet is associated with higher approval in autocracies—in particular, in informational ones—but ratings fall when citizens recognize censorship. In informational autocracies, executive elections trigger a ratings surge if there is leader turnover, but, unlike in democracies, reelected autocrats enjoy little honeymoon.