Abstract
We explore the economic determinants of individual voting behaviour in five UK electoral cycles during 1992–2014. Using the Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Surveys, we investigate the importance of political sentiments and subjective economic evaluations disentangling persistence of party support and unobserved heterogeneity effects. We estimate joint dynamic tripartite models of party support and egocentric perceptions of current and prospective finances, permitting longitudinal simultaneous determination of perceptions of personal finances and political preferences. The results validate the economic voting hypothesis in cycles adjacent to economic downturns: support for the governing political party is positively related to individual perceptions of own financial well-being. Failing to account for simultaneity and not accounting for dynamics and initial political party support inflate the impact of personal financial evaluations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 267-289 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Oxford Economic Papers |
| Volume | 76 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 31 Jan 2024 |
Bibliographical note
This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad [ECO2016-77200-P]; the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [PID2019-111208GB-I00]; and the Generalitat Valenciana [AICO/2019/295].The data used in this article are available from https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=5151 and https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/doi?id=6614
Keywords
- egocentric economic evaluations
- voting behaviour
- Political preferences
- joint models
- simultaneity
- Unobserved heterogeneity