Internet surveys provide highly cost-effective opportunities for analysts to conduct experimental research. Unlike small-N laboratory experiments with unrepresentative groups, subjects in internet ...experiments can be large representative samples of populations of interest. This paper illustrates the potential of internet survey experiments by presenting the results of research conducted in a study of factors that affect political choice in major referendums. The experiment, conducted in the United States at the time of the 2006 mid-term elections, was designed to investigate the effects of cues provided by parties and their leaders on voting in a hypothetical national referendum to deny public services to illegal immigrants. Analyses indicate that these cues have conditional effects. Operating in a context where many voters have partisan identifications and dispositions towards message-senders, party and leader cues influence voting net of other factors that drive political choice.
The claim that the 2008 presidential election was a transformative one is fast becoming part of the conventional wisdom of American politics. Despite the election’s undoubted significance, this paper ...argues that factors affecting voting decisions were strikingly similar to those operating in many previous presidential elections. Using data from the CCAP six-wave national election survey, we demonstrate that a valence politics model provides a powerful, parsimonious explanation of the ballot decisions Americans made in 2008. As is typical in presidential elections, candidate images had major effects on electoral choice. Controlling for several other relevant factors, racial attitudes were strongly associated with how voters reacted to the candidates. Other models of electoral choice, such as a Downsian issue-proximity model, are also relevant, but their explanatory power is considerably less than that provided by the valence politics model.
► Valence politics model provides powerful explanation of voting in 2008 U.S. election. ► Economy was the dominant issue. ► Racial attitudes also were significant. ► Position issues were less important.
In recent years, students of voting behavior have become increasingly interested in valence politics models of electoral choice. These models share the core assumption that key issues in electoral ...politicds typically are ones upon which there is a widespread public consensus on the goals of public policy. The present paper uses latent curve modeling procedures and data from a six-wave national panel survey of the American electorate to investigate the dynamic effects of voters’ concerns with the worsening economy—a valence issue
par excellence—in the skein of causal forces at work in the 2008 presidential election campaign. As the campaign developed, the economy became the dominant issue. Although the massively negative public reaction to increasingly perilous economic conditions was not the only factor at work in 2008, dynamic multivariate analyses show that mounting worries about the economy played an important role in fueling Barack Obama’s successful run for the presidency.
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. Bourgeois society has been cast in a purely economic mold; its foundations, beams, and beacons are all made of economic material. Joseph Schumpeter 1942, 73 Since the late 1960s, rational choice models based on economic variables have become the dominant mode of analysis, while cultural factors have been deemphasized to an unrealistic degree. Ronald Inglehart 1990, 16
Recent studies of voting behavior in Anglo-American elections have demonstrated the clear superiority of the valence model over its rivals for explaining how people cast their ballots. In this paper ...we test the portability of the valence model in a particularly challenging setting the 2009 German Parliamentary elections. Although there are reasons to think that a spatial model might outperform the valence model, we find that the valence model outperforms it with results similar to previous findings in other political settings.
The Euro-Barometer values battery has provided much of the empirical evidence for the thesis that a shift from materialist to postmaterialist values has occurred in advanced industrial societies over ...the past two decades. It has been argued, however, that this widely used instrument is seriously flawed because of its sensitivity to current economic conditions. We present data from experiments in Canada and Germany that tested the performance of the values battery in an era of joblessness. Analyses reveal that (1) substituting an unemployment statement for the standard inflation statement in the battery has major consequences for the classification of respondents as materialist or postmaterialist and (2) answers to the battery are conditioned by the interaction between its content and respondents' economic issue concerns. These findings support the argument that much of the shift from materialist to postmaterialist values recorded by the Euro-Barometer since the early 1980s is a measurement artifact.
This paper assesses the explanatory power of rival models of voting behavior in the 2010 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. Multivariate analyses of data gathered in a 2008-10 national ...panel survey indicate that a combination of national-level valence and positional issues had strong effects on the choices voters made. Campaigning in 2008 during the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, Barack Obama had boldly reiterated the mantra "Change You Can Believe In" to propel his successful race for the presidency. There were serious political consequences when the expectations he raised went unfulfilled. High unemployment and anaemic growth continued to beset the economy in 2010, and the President's landmark health-care legislation and policy proposals in areas such as climate change and immigration were debated in a context of widespread disappointment with his performance. This context enhanced voters' susceptibility to Republican claims that the President's policies initiatives were ill-advised. The result was a politically toxic mix of valence and positional issues which corroded Obama's image and worked strongly against Democratic candidates.
In an article published in this Journal, Nadeau, Martin and Blais argue that perceptions of the costs and benefits of alternative outcomes and general orientations to risk interact to affect voters' ...decisions in referendums on fundamental political questions such as Quebec sovereignty. We use Nadeau et al.'s data to demonstrate that their interaction-effects model is overly complex and suffers from serious multicollinearity difficulties. A simpler main-effects model has virtually identical explanatory power and removes anomalous findings. We also argue that their model is too simple because it omits variables such as party identification, feelings about party leaders and government performance evaluations that voters use as heuristic devices to help them make decisions when stakes are high and information about the costs and benefits of referendum outcomes is low. We analyse a dataset that includes these variables and demonstrate that they have strong effects in a model of referendum voting that controls for perceived costs and benefits of alternative referendum outcomes and several other variables. Additionally, differences in the magnitudes of the perceived costs and perceived benefits of alternative referendum outcomes are not statistically significant. This latter finding contradicts widely cited experimental results in behavioural economics and related ‘asymmetry’ hypotheses concerning the presumed status quo bias in major referendums.
Survey research on political efficacy is longstanding. In a number of countries
efficacy has been measured using batteries of negatively worded
"agree-disagree" statements. In this paper, we ...investigate
the measurement properties of the Canadian variant of this traditional battery
and compare its performance with an alternative, positively worded, battery. The
research is based on data gathered by a random half-sample experiment
administered in the 2004 Political Support in Canada national panel survey.
Analyses of these data provide no evidence that negatively framing the
statements designed to tap political efficacy is problematic. Rather, it appears
that students of political efficacy would have been worse off if they had spent
the past several decades conducting analyses employing positively worded
variants of the traditional statements. Perhaps most important, scholars have
not been misled by acquiescence bias depressing efficacious responses to the
traditional battery. These experimental results indicate that widespread
political inefficacy in contemporary democracies is a fact, not an
artifact.
Although commentary on the ‘gender gap’ is a staple of political discourse in the United States, most analyses of the dynamics of presidential approval have ignored possible gender differences in the ...forces driving approval ratings of US presidents. This article analyses gender differences in the impact of economic evaluations and political interventions on the dynamics of presidential approval between 1978 and 1997. The analyses are made possible by disaggregating 240 monthly Survey of Consumers datasets gathered over this period. These data show that women's economic evaluations are consistently more pessimistic than men's, regardless of who occupied the Oval Office. Analyses of rival presidential approval models reveal that a national prospective economic evaluation model performs best for women, but a personal prospective model works best for men. Parameter estimates indicate that economic evaluations accounted for substantial proportions of gender differences in presidential approval in the post-Carter era. Men and women also reacted differently to presidential transitions, with approval increasing more among men when Reagan replaced Carter, and more among women when Clinton replaced Bush. The hypothesis that men are more susceptible than women to rally effects induced by domestic and international crises and wars does not receive consistent support.
