Following up the discussions by Larry Bartels, David Brady, and myself on trends in partisanship, Chris Wlezien writes:
This brought to mind my [Wlezien’s] work with Mark Kayser. Here’s the paper, which pertains to Europe and quite different trends, i.e., declining partisanship and growing (objective) economic effects on the vote. We’ve been planning to address the individual-level perceptual effects, which we suspect have been declining in Europe precisely because of declining partisanship (and contamination of economic perceptions). The opposite seemingly should be true in the US.
Here’s what they find:
Numerous studies have demonstrated a weakening identification of voters with political parties in Western Europe over the last three decades. It is argued here that the growing proportion of voters with weak or no party affinities has strong implications for economic voting. When the proportion of voters with partisan affinities is low, the effect of economic performance on election outcomes is strong; when partisans proliferate, economic conditions matter less. Employing Eurobarometer data for eight European countries from 1976 to 1992, this inverse association between partisanship and the economic vote is demonstrated. This finding implies a growing effect for the objective economy on the vote in Europe. It helps explain an important puzzle in the economic voting literature: Weak results in aggregate level cross-national studies of economic voting may be attributable to charac- teristics of the electorate, not just to the characteristics of government.
The graphs are fine, but I would prefer combining Figures 1 and 2 into a single two-column figure with a separate row for each of the eight countries. And please don’t list the countries alphabetically. And can’t Figure 4 be done at the country level also? As for the tables . . . the less said, the better. “7.966,” indeed. The paper is interesting, though. Important work.