Is ‘Clarity of Responsibility’ Important for Economic Voting? Revisiting Powell and Whitten's Hypothesis

Abstract

In the words of Martin Paldam, comparative economic voting studies suffer from a 'great instability'-i.e., economic effects appear in some countries at some times, but not others, and tend to be weak and inconsistent across studies. 1 Powell and Whitten propose a possible solution to the 'instability' of cross-national voting studies: 'to explain differences in retrospective economic voting across nations and over time we must take account of the political context within which elections take place'. 2 More specifically, they take into account the 'context of political responsibility', arguing that voters are more likely to punish/reward incumbent governments if it is very clear which parties are responsible for economic conditions. 3 They find that voters hold government parties responsible for the economy when there is high 'clarity of responsibility', but not when 'clarity of responsibility' is low. In this Note we respecify and update Powell and Whitten's model, and then retest the 'clarity of responsibility' hypothesis in two different ways. First, in addition to looking at change in vote for governing parties as a whole as the dependent variable, as do Powell and Whitten (hereafter, 'PW'), we look at what happens to vote for the dominant party in governing coalitions. Secondly, we argue that there are some problems with PW's 'clarity of responsibility' measure, and we propose and test an alternative. We find no support for PW's conclusion that 'clarity of responsibility' is crucial for economic voting; instead, we find that 'political context' defined in a new way may be important.

Who is responsible for what? Clarity of responsibilities in multilevel states: The case of Spain

“…This problem is not exclusive to decentralised systems but is associated with other forms of division of powers, such as coalition governments. Research has extensively dealt with the impact of other forms of divided government on electoral accountability (Powell & Whitten 1993;Leyden & Borrelli 1995;Royed et al 2000;Lowry et al 1998;Anderson 2006b;Anderson 2000;Duch & Stevenson 2008: 252ff). 5.…”

Asymmetric federalism and economic voting

“…In the classic model of electoral accountability, voters use elections to reward or punish politicians on the basis of their past performance (Fiorina 1981). However, elections can only work as an effective retrospective mechanism to control governments insofar as there is clarity of responsibility (Key 1966;Ferejohn 1986;Royed et al 2000;Powell 2000). If citizens cannot clearly distinguish spheres of authority across levels of government, voters' electoral punishments or rewards may be barely connected to incumbents' past performance, which takes the whole classic reward-punishment model of electoral accountability to task.…”

“…There is a large body of literature that shows that complex institutional contexts complicate responsibility attribution and, in turn, make it difficult for voters to hold governments to account. Different forms of horizontal division of powers, such as coalition governments or bicameral opposition, are associated with low levels of clarity, which attenuates the economy-voting relationship (Anderson 2000;Hobolt & Tilley 2014a;Lowry et al 1998;Nadeau et al 2002;Powell & Whitten 1993;Royed et al 2000). More recent contributions have shown that the institutional conditions that weaken the rewardpunishment model for economic outcomes may also attenuate voting on issues other than the economy, such as healthcare (Hobolt et al 2013) or European integration (De Vries et al 2011).…”

Yardstick competition and the political costs of raising taxes: An empirical analysis of Spanish municipalities

“…The few papers to analyse the effects of taxation on multiparty systems have followed this procedure (see for example Royed et al, 2000, Landon and Ryan, 1992, and Vermeier and Heyndels, 2004. However, we also use the vote share of the main party in the government in addition to this variable, which is the 6 The most relevant in terms of local governments controlled are CiU and ERC (right and left-wing, respectively, both in Catalonia), UV (right-wing, in Valencia), and BNG (left-wing, in Galicia), but there are one or two in each region.…”