Timothy Hellwig

Constructing Accountability: Party Position Taking and Economic Voting

A positive relationship between economic performance and support for incumbents is routinely taken as evidence that elections work for accountability. Recent investigations into this relationship have examined just how signals from the economy translate into popular support. However, neither selection models nor sanctioning models explicitly incorporate the actions of political elites. This article advances a strategic parties model of economic voting. Political incumbents have incentives to adjust their policy positions in response to economic conditions. When parties advocate distinct positions on economic issues, elections can be understood in terms of economic conditions. But when party positions converge, the quality of economic information declines. Incumbents can thus improve their chances of avoiding blame for a poor economy—or of claiming credit for a good one—by adjusting positions in policy space. Analyses of party positions, economic conditions, and election outcomes in 17 democracies over 35 years support this prediction.

Different groups, different threats: public attitudes towards immigrants‡

ABSTRACT Research on attitudes towards immigrants devotes much attention to the relative effects of economic and social-psychological factors for understanding sentiment towards immigrants, conceived in general terms. In this article, we advance this work by arguing that the context framing immigration concerns leads publics to associate different types of immigrants with different threats. An issue context that diminishes support for one ‘type’ can boost it for another. Evidence from an original survey experiment in Britain supports this claim. Security fears affect attitudes towards Muslim immigrants but economic concerns bear on views towards Eastern Europeans. While concern about crime adversely affects sentiment for East Europeans but casts Muslims more positively, cultural threats have the opposite effect. By shifting the focus onto the qualities of different types of immigrants, we highlight the importance of the target immigrant group for understanding public attitudes.

Elections and Accountability for the Economy: A Conceptual and Empirical Reassessment

Abstract Does electoral accountability exist under democracy? Given its normative importance, this question remains central to empirical research. Even so, scholars do not agree on a definition of the dependent variable. Some insist that in order for accountability to exist, voters must reelect incumbents for good performance or remove them from office for bad performance. However most scholars require only that voters reward or punish incumbents for good or bad performance, measured in terms of vote shares. We explore the extent to which accountability exists across the range of definitions, from vote shares through changes in seat shares to the question of incumbent survival in office. We have two main findings. First, accountability exists across the range of potential meanings of the word – including changes in partisan control. Second, institutional factors thought to mitigate connections between past performance and vote shares do not function as predicted, both across meanings of accountability and across democratic regimes. Instead, partisan change – the most substantively meaningful measure of electoral accountability – is more likely under conditions of low clarity of responsibility. More broadly, we identify regime‐specific contexts to show that opportunities for elite control often diffuse or negate the effects of clarity of responsibility. These findings advance our understanding of the nature and extent of accountability linkages under different constitutional designs.

Balancing Demands: The World Economy and the Composition of Policy Preferences

Researchers remain divided on the consequences of market integration. Some argue that openness increases pressures for social protection; others claim that liberalization constrains policy makers. These debates gloss over a key link between globalization and domestic politics: the preferences of the electorate. This article argues that exposure to flows of goods, services, and capital matters for policy attitudes. However, the extent to which signals from the world economy affect preferences depends on issue domain. Voters respond to signals from the world economy by demanding less in areas where constrained governments can no longer deliver but more where they still can. The implication is that while globalization has no consistent influence on general support for government action, it does matter for the composition of policy preferences. A range of data analyses supports these claims. Results shed new light on arguments about the effect of globalization on domestic politics.

Taking cues on multidimensional issues: the case of attitudes toward immigration

Abstract What determines popular attitudes toward immigration? Recent work emphasises the importance of education rather than economic or labour market factors. Missing from this work, however, is a consideration of elite positions. This study extends education-based accounts in two key ways: by acknowledging the multidimensional nature of the immigration issue and by incorporating cues from party elites. Cues from trusted elites inform popular attitudes on immigration. But rather than serving as a heuristic for the less sophisticated, elite cues on immigration are disproportionately employed by those more educated individuals who rely on elite positions to form opinions on multidimensional issues, like immigration, on which they are cross-pressured. Theoretical expectations are supported by evidence from cross-national analyses of party positions and public opinion and from a longitudinal examination of mass and party positions in Denmark. The results call attention to the importance of dimensionality in the formation of issue opinions.

The Structure of Issue Voting in Postindustrial Democracies

Issues matter for elections. The issue environment, however, varies across political campaigns as well as across countries. How does the issue environment structure the vote? Is the issue space single- or multidimensional? Do issues vary in terms of salience across parties or nations? This article addresses these questions using an original dataset of mass and elite policy positions covering the United States and nine other industrialized nations. Results show that while the traditional language of politics—expressed as the left/right divide—still resonates, the issue space is not single dimensional but two dimensional. Issues associated with globalization represent a crosscutting divide, which complicates the voters decision. Further, the salience of an issue to a party varies as a function of the partys type, size, and age. This article shows how a cross-national approach provides perspective on how voter decision making operates in different country contexts.

Does the economy matter? Economic perceptions and the vote in Australia

ABSTRACT Does the economy matter for how Australians vote in federal elections? International studies show an association between economic performance and elections, but research on Australia finds that the impact of the economy on voting is modest. What explains this relative absence of economic voting? How do Australians perceive the economy? And how do economic perceptions inform their decisions at the polls? Our results confirm the lack of an association between economic indicators and incumbent vote shares. Analyses of survey data from 1996 to 2013 show that political factors condition perceptions of economic performance, while preferences for – and perceptions of – the governments unified control over economic policy shape the influence of economic perceptions on voter choice. Overall, responsibility attributions are the key to economic voting in Australia.

The hidden cost of consensus: How coordinated market economies insulate politics

Previous research has argued that while elections motivate parties to respond to public sentiment, global economic ties reduce this responsiveness by redirecting elites from their electorates and toward market actors. In this study, we extend this work to examine the influence of globalization on party responsiveness across different forms of production-welfare regimes. Coordinated market economies (CMEs) accommodate economic interdependence by striking corporatist bargains between political elites, trade union representatives, and organized business. Although these consensual relations facilitate economic stability, they also insulate policymakers from voters. Analyses that pair public opinion and party positions across 18 advanced capitalist democracies from 1977 to 2009 show that while CMEs permit political elites a wide room to maneuver under economic globalization, political parties competing in these organized market economies do not respond to public opinion. This is the case regardless of level of exposure to world markets. In CMEs, party position-taking is uninfluenced by external factors (economic globalization) and domestic factors (public opinion) alike. By examining the consequences for party behavior, our results raise questions about the virtues of coordinated market capitalism for the health of representative democracy.

A Heteroscedastic Spatial Model of the Vote: A Model with Application to the United States

How do candidate policy positions affect the citizen’s vote choice? From the Downsian tradition, a common response to this question is that voters identify where contending candidates are located on policy space and then select the candidate closest to them. A well-known finding in current models of political psychology, however, is that voters have biased perceptions of the ideological location of competing candidates in elections. In this chapter we offer a general approach to incorporate information effects into current spatial models of voting. The proposed heteroscedastic proximity model (HPM) of voting incorporates information effects in equilibrium models of voting to provide a solution to common attenuation biases observed in most equilibrium models of vote choice. We test the heteroscedastic proximity model of voting on three U.S. presidential elections in 1980, 1996, and 2008.

Public support for Latin American presidents: The cyclical model in comparative perspective

What characterizes the dynamics of presidential popularity? Research based on the United States of America finds popularity exhibits an almost law-like cyclicality over a president’s term: high post-election “honeymoon” approval rates deteriorate before experiencing an end-of-term boost as new elections approach. We contend that cyclical approval dynamics are not specific to the USA, but rather characteristic of presidential systems more generally, despite heterogeneity in their socio-economic and political contexts. Testing this proposition requires overcoming a key empirical problem: lack of comparable data. We do so by employing time-series inputs from 324 opinion surveys from a new publicly available database—the Executive Approval Database 1.0—to craft quarterly measures of popularity across 18 Latin American contemporary presidential democracies. Our analysis strongly confirms the cyclical approval model for the region. The conclusion identifies avenues for future research on the relationships across approval, presidentialism, and electoral, institutional, and socio-economic factors afforded by the new data resource we present here.