Harold D. Clarke

Performance Politics and the British Voter

What matters most to voters when they choose their leaders? This book suggests that performance politics is at the heart of contemporary democracy, with voters forming judgments about how well competing parties and leaders perform on important issues. Given the high stakes and uncertainty involved, voters rely heavily on partisan cues and party leader images as guides to electoral choice. However, the authors argue that the issue agenda of British politics has changed markedly in recent years. A cluster of concerns about crime, immigration and terrorism now mix with perennial economic and public service issues. Since voters and parties often share the same positions on these issues, political competition focuses on who can do the best job. This book shows that a model emphasizing flexible partisan attachments, party leader images and judgments of party competence on key issues can explain electoral choice in Britain and elsewhere.

Prospections, Retrospections, and Rationality: The "Bankers" Model of Presidential Approval Reconsidered

MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson (1992) recently have challenged a long-standing conventional wisdom by claiming that sociotropic prospections dominate presidential approval models. Net of long-term expectations about the economy, judgments about its past performance are not significant. However, when nonstationarity in the time series of interest is taken into account, analyses of models similar to MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimsons and analyses of an alternative error correction model both indicate that retrospections as well as prospections are influential. They also contend that the electorate forms its economic expectations according to a rational expectations model. This claim is unfounded because their analyses and data are inadequate for assessing it.

The Political Economy of Attitudes toward Polity and Society in Western European Democracies

This article employs 1976-1986 Euro-Barometer data to investigate the political economy of public attitudes toward prevailing political and social arrangements in eight Western European countries. Pooled cross-sectional time series analyses reveal that the effects of economic conditions extend beyond their impact on governing party support to influence feelings of life and democracy satisfaction and demands for radical and reformist social change. Attitudes toward democracy and social change also respond to important political events such as the occurrence and outcomes of national elections. We conclude by arguing that the political economy of attitudes toward polity and society in contemporary Western democracies is real, but limited by widely shared beliefs that have become key elements in the political cultures of these countries.

National Elections and Political Attitudes: The Case of Political Efficacy

Elections constitute a principal avenue of citizen involvement in political life, and knowledge of their effects on public attitudes towards the polity and the role of the individual therein has important implications for theories of democratic governance. One sucli attitude is political efficacy, ‘the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact on the political process’. Although many studies have documented that political efficacy is positively associated with electoral participation, the causal mechanisms involved are not well understood. Most researchers have simply assumed that the ‘causal arrow’ runs from efficacy to participation, i.e. from the attitude to the behaviour. Investigations of the hypothesis that the behaviour (participation) affects the attitude (efficacy) are rare. Rarer still are enquiries focusing on the impact of election outcomes on efficacy, and studies that examine both effects are virtually non-existent. In this Note covariance structure analysis is used to investigate the effects of voting, campaign activity and the outcomes of the 1984 national elections on political efficacy in the American electorate.

MEASURING VALUE CHANGE IN WESTERN INDUSTRIALIZED SOCIETIES: THE IMPACT OF UNEMPLOYMENT

During the past two decades a four-item battery administered in biannual EuroBarometer surveys has been used to measure changing value priorities in Western European countries. We provide evidence that the measure is seriously flawed. Pooled crosssectional time series analyses for the 1976-86 period reveal that the Euro-Barometer postmaterialist-materialist value index and two of its components are very sensitive to short-term changes in economic conditions, and that the failure to include a statement about unemployment in the four-item values battery accounts for much of the apparent growth of postmaterialist values in several countries after 1980. The aggregate-level findings are buttressed by analyses of panel data from three countries.

The (un)importance of party leaders: Leader images and party choice in the 1987 british election

Most research has deemphasized the influence of leader images on British voting. This paper uses the 1987 British Campaign Study data to investigate the structure of leader images and the determinants of electoral choice. Confirmatory factor analyses reveal two image dimensions--competence and responsiveness. These dimensions were associated more closely for the opposition leaders than for the prime minister. Multivariate analyses show that leader images had strong effects on party choice. Practical wisdom about party leaders should inform credible models of party support in an era of partisan dealignment.

A New Model for Old Measures: A Covariance Structure Analysis of Political Efficacy

Political efficacy is a key concept in theories of political participation and democratic governance. This paper uses covariance structure analytic techniques to assess the adequacy of traditional SRC indicators for measuring political efficacy in the United States and other liberal democracies. Analyses indicate that a two-factor model of a subset of these indicators fits data for the U.S. and six other countries very well, with item loadings corresponding to prevailing conceptual distinctions between internal and external efficacy. In the American case the structure of the model is invariant by race, gender and political context, and the relative strength of correlations between the efficacy factors and measures of personal competence and perceived government responsiveness agrees with theoretical expectations. Although the SRC items appear to be useful measures of efficacy, simple equally weighted additive indices such as those utilized by the SRC itself are inadequate. More sophisticated measurement models are required.

Recapturing the Falklands: Models of Conservative Popularity, 1979–83

Recently, Sanders et al. have made the intriguing and counter-intuitive argument that the impact of the Falklands war on Conservative popularity was inconsequential. Their analyses raise important theoretical and methodological issues concerning the time-series analysis of party support. This present article contends that the stepwise regression procedures employed by Sanders et al. are misleading, particularly when predictor variables are highly intercorrelated. Box-Jenkins analyses demonstrate that the Falklands strongly influenced Conservative support, net of the effects of macroeconomic conditions and personal economic expectations. The significance of the latter variable in the models confirms Sanders et al. s argument about the role of subjective economic variables in party popularity functions. Non-economic variables are also relevant, however, and popularity functions that model them correctly will enhance our understanding of both the economics and the politics of party support.

Downs, stokes and the dynamics of electoral choice

A six-wave 2005–09 national panel survey conducted in conjunction with the British Election Study provided data for an investigation of sources of stability and change in voters’ party preferences. The authors test competing spatial and valence theories of party choice and investigate the hypothesis that spatial calculations provide cues for making valence judgements. Analyses reveal that valence mechanisms – heuristics based on party leader images, party performance evaluations and mutable partisan attachments – outperform a spatial model in terms of strength of direct effects on party choice. However, spatial effects still have sizeable indirect effects on the vote via their influence on valence judgements. The results of exogeneity tests bolster claims about the flow of influence from spatial calculations to valence judgments to electoral choice.

Economic Evaluations, Prime Ministerial Approval and Governing Party Support: Rival Models Reconsidered

The argument that personal economic expectations drive support for British governing parties has received wide attention. This article employs aggregate data for the 1979–92 period to assess the effects of personal expectations, other subjective economic variables and evaluations of prime ministerial performance in rival party-support models. Analyses of competing models, including error correction specifications that take into account nonstationarity in the time series of interest, indicate that the personal expectations variants generally do very well, although they do not outperform one or more alternatives incorporating other types of economic evaluations. The error correction models show that the prime ministers approval ratings have significant short-term and long-term effects on governing party popularity.