Marianne C. Stewart

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 (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.

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.

New Models for New Labour: The Political Economy of Labour Party Support, January 1992–April 1997

This article uses newly available British time-series data to analyze dynamic interrelationships among Labour vote intentions, perceptions that the Labour leader would make the best prime minister, and Labour party identification. Error-correction models reveal that best prime minister perceptions and party identification have important short- and long-run influences on vote intentions. Tests of rival models indicate that personal economic expectations outperform other economic evaluations in the vote intention and party identification analyses. National retrospective judgments perform well in analyses of best prime minister perceptions, and emotional reactions to economic conditions significantly influence these perceptions as well as party identification.

Dealignment of Degree: Partisan Change in Britain, 1974-83

This paper investigates trends in party identification in Britain between 1974 and 1983, and assesses the impact of short-term forces on partisan change. Although panel data reveal that patterns of partisan migration after 1974 differed from those of the early 1970s, the net result was continuing dealignment. Multivariate analyses indicate that the strength and durability of party ties reflect evaluations of performance on salient issues and changing levels of party leader affect. Since party identification is endogenous to the set of forces operating in the electoral arena during particular time intervals, the future of Britains partially dealigned party system is uncertain.

Partisan Inconsistency and Partisan Change in Federal States: The Case of Canada

Recent research on partisan instability has shown that party identification is endogenous to candidate, issue, and other transient forces in the electoral arena. This paper uses 1974, 1979, and 1980 Canadian national panel data to argue that federalism may enhance tendencies toward partisan change net of issue, candidate, or other effects. By increasing the number of arenas in which interparty conflict occurs, a federal system permits and perhaps encourages voters to develop different party identifications at national and subnational levels of government. Such patterns of party identification, in turn, accentuate the probability of subsequent partisan change at both levels. This finding cautions that orientations toward political parties cannot be properly understood without reference to the structural properties of a polity.

The Dynamics of Party Identification in Federal Systems: The Canadian Case

Рассматривается проблема идентификации избирателей с политическими партиями в Канаде в период 1974-1993 гг. Исследованы связи между партийной идентификацией избирателей на двух уровнях федеральной системы - общенациональном и провинциальном. Проанализированы возможные причины наблюдаемой в Канаде нестабильности партийной идентификации и ее расхождения на различных уровнях. Предложена модель, описывающая партийную идентификацию в условиях децентрализованной федеральной политической системы. Обсуждается влияние конфигурации политических институтов на партийную идентификацию и политическое поведение граждан.