James Tilley

A Vote Against Europe? Explaining Defection at the 1999 and 2004 European Parliament Elections

Governing parties generally win fewer votes at European Parliament elections than at national electionsmost common explanation for this is that European elections are ‘second order national elections’ acting as mid-term referendums on government performance. This article proposes an alternative, though complementary, explanation: voters defect because governing parties are generally far more pro-European than the typical voter. Additionally, the more the campaign context primes Eurosceptic sentiments, the more likely voters are to turn against governing parties. A multi-level model is used to test these propositions and analyse the effects of individual and contextual factors at the 1999 and 2004 European Parliament elections. Both European and domestic concerns matter to voters; moreover, campaign context plays an important role in shaping vote choices.

Is the Government to Blame? An Experimental Test of How Partisanship Shapes Perceptions of Performance and Responsibility

The idea that voters use elections to hold governments to account for their performance lies at the heart of democratic theory, and countless studies have shown that economic performance can predict support for incumbents. Nonetheless recent work has challenged this simple link between policy performance and party choice by arguing that any relationship is conditioned by prior political beliefs, notably partisanship. Some have argued that economic perceptions are shaped by party choice rather than vice versa. Others have claimed that voters tend to attribute responsibility for perceived successes to their favored party, but absolve them of responsibility if performance is poor. This study examines the effect of partisanship on both performance evaluations and responsibility attributions using survey experiments to disentangle the complex causal relationships. Our findings show that partisan loyalties have pervasive effects on responsibility attributions, but somewhat weaker effects on evaluations of perfo...

Blaming Europe? : responsibility without accountability in the European Union

PART ONE: BLAMING THE EUROPEAN UNION? 1. Blaming Europe? 2. Who is responsible? PART TWO: CITIZENS AND BLAME 3. When do citizens get it right? 4. When do citizens get it wrong? PART THREE: THE MEDIA, POLITICIANS, AND BLAME 5. Who do the media blame? 6. Who do the media inform? 7. Who do politicians blame? PART FOUR: THE CONSEQUENCES OF BLAME 8. Does responsibility matter? 9. Conclusion: Responsibility without accountability Appendix Bibliography

Political Knowledge and Enlightened Preferences: Party Choice Through the Electoral Cycle

This article adapts and tests the theory of enlightened preferences on two British electoral cycles: 1992–97 and 1997–2001. Using individual-level panel data, it extends previous work by explicitly incorporating the role of political knowledge. Its findings are generally very supportive of the theory. It is shown that knowledge of party platforms varies through both electoral cycles in a manner predicted by the theory; that is, it is highest immediately following election campaigns; these changes in political knowledge are closely mirrored by changes in the explanatory power of a model of party choice containing so-called ‘fundamental variables’ (i.e. socio-demographic and issue-related variables) as predictors. More specifically, fundamental variables do a much better job of accounting for party choice during election years than in mid-cycle. Finally, for all years of both panels a positive interaction is found between political knowledge and the ability of voters to match their issue preferences to party platforms.

The Attribution of Credit and Blame to Governments and Its Impact on Vote Choice

This article examines how voters attribute credit and blame to governments for policy success and failure, and how this affects their party support. Using panel data from Britain between 1997 and 2001 and Ireland between 2002 and 2007 to model attribution, the interaction between partisanship and evaluation of performance is shown to be crucial. Partisanship resolves incongruities between party support and policy evaluation through selective attribution: favoured parties are not blamed for policy failures and less favoured ones are not credited with policy success. Furthermore, attributions caused defections from Labour over the 1997–2001 election cycle in Britain, and defections from the Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrat coalition over the 2002–07 election cycle in Ireland. Using models of vote switching and controlling for partisanship to minimize endogeneity problems, it is shown that attributed evaluations affect vote intention much more than unattributed evaluations. This result holds across several policy areas and both political systems.

The Macroeconomic Factors Conditioning the Impact of Identity on Attitudes towards the EU

Factors relating to identity and to economics have been shown to be important predictors of attitudes towards the European Union (EU). In this article, we show that the impact of identity is conditional on economic context. First, living in a member state that receives relatively high levels of EU funding acts as a ‘buffer’, diluting the impact of an exclusive national identity on Euroscepticism. Second, living in a relatively wealthy member state, with its associated attractiveness for economic migrants, increases the salience of economic xenophobia as a driver of sceptical attitudes. These results highlight the importance of seeing theories of attitude formation (such as economic and identity theories) not as competitors but rather as complementary, with the predictive strength of one theoretical approach (identity) being a function of system-level variation in factors relating to the other theoretical approach (macro-level economic conditions).

How Parties Shape Class Politics: Explaining the Decline of the Class Basis of Party Support

Why has the association between class and party declined over time? Contrary to conventional wisdom that emphasizes the fracturing of social structures and blurring of class boundaries in post-industrial society, it is argued here that class divisions in party preferences are conditioned by the changing shape of the class structure and the effect of parties’ strategic ideological responses to this transformation on the choices facing voters. This thesis is tested using British survey data from 1959 to 2006. We demonstrate that increasing class heterogeneity does not account for the decline of the class–party association, which occurs primarily as a result of ideological convergence between the main parties resulting from New Labours shift to the centre.

Fleeing the centre: the rise of challenger parties in the aftermath of the euro crisis

Abstract The eurozone crisis has altered the party political landscape across Europe. The most visible effect is the rise of challenger parties. The crisis not only caused economic hardship, but also placed considerable fiscal constraints upon a number of national governments. Many voters have reacted to this by turning their back on the traditional parties and opting instead for new, or reinvigorated, challenger parties that reject the mainstream consensus of austerity and European integration. This article argues that both sanctioning and selection mechanisms can help to explain this flight from the centre to challenger parties. First, voters who were economically adversely affected by the crisis punish mainstream parties both in government and in opposition by voting for challenger parties. Second, the choice of specific challenger party is shaped by preferences on three issues that directly flow from the euro crisis: EU integration, austerity and immigration. Analysing both aggregate-level and individual-level survey data from all 17 Western EU member states, this article finds strong support for both propositions and shows how the crisis has reshaped the nature of party competition in Europe.

The Depoliticization of Inequality and Redistribution: Explaining the Decline of Class Voting

The collapse of the class basis of party choice in Britain since the 1980s has been assumed to result from the diminishing distinctiveness of social classes in the postindustrial world. We argue instead that class dealignment results from the impact of an ideologically restricted choice set on the electoral relevance of values concerning inequality and redistribution. As these values provide a mechanism through which class divisions translate into differences in party choice, their declining relevance produces a concomitant decline in the effect of class position. These propositions are tested using British survey data covering the period from 1983 to 2010. We show that a supply-side constriction in the choices presented to voters, rather than the weakening of class divisions, accounts for the declining political relevance of redistributive values and the class basis of party choice. The politics of class influences class voting, not vice versa.

Political generations and partisanship in the UK, 1964-1997

Summary. Political partisanship is often claimed to be influenced by generational and life‐cycle processes, with both being cited as the factor that is responsible for higher levels of Conservative identifications among older voters. Given the existence of over‐time change it is difficult to assess the validity of these claims as even with repeated survey data any model is underidentified. This paper uses smoothed additive models to isolate and examine the non‐linear component of the generational effect. Some identifying assumptions are presented to try to assess the extent to which linear aging or generational processes are responsible for the increased Conservatism of the elderly. The advantage of the smoothed additive models is their ability to highlight non‐linear effects, however, and this paper shows that regardless of linear trends people who entered the electorate during Conservative Parliaments are more likely to be Conservative partisan identifiers many years later. The introduction of a multiplicative term linking age to period effects supports this hypothesis by showing that younger people are more susceptible to the influence of period effects.