Polarization and the heterogeneous nature of economic voting in Europe

Absztrakt (kivonat)

Economic voting is accounted for in the literature as phenome that has a rather contingent than a categorical effect. Therefore, a cross-national analysis of the phenomena could reveal more than a single-country case study. Based on individual-level survey data collected by the European Social Survey ERIC (2020) this study provides an empirical analysis to test the effect of institutional constraints on economic voting, and how polarisation affects economic voting and democratic accountability. The novelty of this research is that it introduces a new way to measure the relationship between economic perception and vote choice. It uses the eta squared figure to measure the relationship between the variables. The study validates previous research on clarity of responsibility (Anderson 2000; Powell and Whitten 1993) and contributes to the literature with a new decisive factor, namely with the level of partisan polarisation that strongly influences economic voting in a cross-national comparison. The other novelty of the analysis is that it links economic voting to the quality of democracy and discovers a converse relationship. The stronger effect of partisan group membership on the evaluations of the economy indicates a lower value in various democracy indexes.