Political Science

ABSTRACT Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Recent research has shown that elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a'footprint'of low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at subsequent elections. Elections that stimulate high turnout leave a high turnout footprint.

As a dependent variable, party choice did not lend itself to analysis by means of powerful multivariate methods until the coming of discrete-choice models, most notably conditional logit and multinomial logit. These methods involve estimating effects on party preferences (utilities) that are post hoc derived from the data, but such estimates are plagued by a number of difficulties. These difficulties do not apply if advanced statistical procedures are used to analyze utilities directly measured with survey data. Such variables have been employed for a number of years and have been extensively validated in past research. Analysis of party choice on the basis of measured utilities is less hampered by restrictions and (often implausible) assumptions than discrete-choice modeling is. Particularly problematic is the Electoral Studies 25 www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud inability of discrete-choice models to analyze small-party voting. The resulting elimination of voters of small parties results in strong biases of the coefficients of explanatory variables. No such need for eliminating cases arises when analyzing empirically observed utilities, so parameter estimates from these analyses do not contain this bias. Finally, observed utilities provide opportunities to answer research questions that cannot be answered with discretechoice models, particularly in comparative research. We therefore urge that direct measures of electoral utilities should be included in all election studies.

Past research has strongly suggested that there is a relationship between economic conditions and election outcomes, but attempts to find individual-level concomitants of these aggregate-level effects have yielded inconclusive findings. This research is the first to look for effects of variations in real economic indicators (growth in GDP, changes in inflation and unemployment) on individual-level party preference across both time and space. We investigate party preferences of voters in 15 countries that are now members of the European Union over a fifteen year period using survey data collected in the aftermath of the European Parliament elections of 1989, 1994 and 1999. These surveys relate to 42 separate electoral contests, a number large enough to provide considerable variation in economic conditions. We do find significant effects of these variations on individual party preferences, even when controlling for past vote and other individual-level independent variables. These effects vary in understandable ways as we remove countries where national elections were held concurrently with European Parliament elections, or countries where the clarity of government responsibility for policy was expected to be low. Economic effects are stronger than any except for issues or distance from parties in left/ right terms. However, it is clear that the economy is only one of the factors that decide elections. Depending on its salience in a given country at a specific time, it could decide the outcome of an election or it could prove less important than other, temporarily more salient, voter concerns.

As a dependent variable, party choice did not lend itself to analysis by means of powerful multivariate methods until the coming of discrete-choice models, most notably Conditional Logit and Multinomial Logit. These methods involve estimating effects on party preferences (utilities) that are post hoc derived from the data, but such estimates are plagued by a number of difficulties. These difficulties do not apply if advanced statistical procedures are used to analyze utilities directly measured with survey data. Such variables have been employed for a number of years and have been extensively validated in past research. Analysis of party choice on the basis of measured utilities is less hampered by restrictions and (often implausible) assumptions than discrete-choice modeling is. Particularly problematic is the inability of discrete-choice models to analyze small-party voting. The resulting elimination of voters of small parties results in strong biases of the coefficients of explanatory variables. No such need for eliminating cases arises when analyzing empirically observed utilities, so parameter estimates from these analyses do not contain this bias. Finally, observed utilities provide opportunities to answer research questions that cannot be answered with discrete-choice models, particularly in comparative research. We therefore urge that direct measures of electoral utilities should be included in all election studies.

Do the productions of the European Union reflect the wishes of the European public? Past research has established a link between public opinion and policy, with the European public responding to the volume of EC/EU legislation. This research investigates the other half of the reciprocal link needed for thermostatic control of policy formation. We find evidence that EU policy-makers do respond to EU public opinion, at least to some extent. There is a substantial disjuncture between the public and policymakers, however. That is, a democratic deficit remains.