Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2009
This article analyses the influence of economic conditions upon the behaviour of voters in elections to Australian, Canadian and New Zealand legislatures between the First and Second World Wars. It shows that this influence need be neither uniform nor unconditional: rather, it is contingent upon both political and economic phenomena. The existence of the relationship as well as its form and strength differ systematically in different settings. It varies according to the stratum of the electorate, the point in time and the type of party analysed.
1 See in particular Fair, Roy C., ‘The Effect of Economic Evnts on Votes for the President’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 60 (1978), 159–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fair, Roy C., ‘The Effect of Economic Events on Votes for the President: A 1984 Update’, Political Behavior, 10 (1988), 168–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hibbs, Douglas A. Jr, The American Political Economy: Macroeconomics and Electoral Politics in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Erikson, Robert S., ‘Economic Conditions and the Presidential Vote’, American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 567–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Kramer, Gerald, ‘Short-term Fluctuations in US Voting Behavior, 1896–1964’, American Political Science Review, 65 (1971), 131–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tufte, Edward R., ‘Determining the Outcomes of Midterm Congressional Elections’, American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), 812–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kiewiet, Donald R. and Rivers, Douglas R., ‘A Retrospective on Retrospective Voting, Political Behavior, 6 (1984), 369–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Stigler, George, ‘General National Economic Conditions and National Elections’, American Economic Review, 63 (1973), 160–7.Google Scholar See also Hibbing, John R., ‘On the Issues Surrounding Economic Voting: Looking to the British Case for Answers’, Comparative Political Studies, 20 (1987), 3–33, at p. 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Compare Erikson, Robert S., ‘Economic Conditions and the Congressional Vote: A Review of the Macrolevel Evidence’, American Journal of Political Science, 34 (1990), 373–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jacobson, Gary C., ‘Does the Economy Matter in Midterm Elections?’, American Journal of Political Science, 34 (1990), 400–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 The terms ‘contingent relationship’ and ‘categorical relationship’ have nothing to do with categorical (i.e., nominal-level) data and contingency tables. Rather, they refer to the nature of the influence of economic conditions upon voters and the results of elections.
6 Owens, John R. and Wade, L., ‘Economic Conditions and Constituency Voting in Great Britain’, Political Studies, 36 (1988), 33–51, at p. 33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Clearly, the appropriateness of an empirical setting also depends upon the number of parties in the party system. A relatively small number permits voters to attribute responsibility to the action of particular parties and thereby to reward or punish them as circumstances warrant. Ceteris paribus, economic voting is weaker in systems with a larger number of parties because voters cannot make this attribution of responsibility as easily or at all. See Lewis-Beck, Michael S., ‘Comparative Economic Voting: Britain, France, Germany, Italy’, American Journal of Political Science, 30 (1986), 315–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Owens, and Wade, , ‘Economic Conditions’, pp. 33–5Google Scholar; see also Happy, J. R., ‘Voter Sensitivity to Economic Conditions: A Canadian–American Comparison’, Comparative Politics, 19 (1986), 45–56, at p. 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hibbing, , ‘On the Issues Surrounding Economic Voting’ p. 21.Google Scholar
9 Several analyses of ‘popularity functions’ (as opposed to ‘vote functions’), however, do consider third parties. See Clarke, Harold D. and Zuk, Gary, ‘The Dynamics of Third-Party Support: The British Liberals, 1951–1979’ American Journal of Political Science, 33 (1989), 299–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Monroe, Kristen R. and Erikson, Lynda, ‘The Economy and Political Support: The Canadian Case’, Journal of Politics, 48 (1986), 616–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Rosenstone, Steven J., Behr, Edward H. and Lazarus, Roy L., Third Parties in America: Citizen Response to Major Party Failure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 93–4Google Scholar; see also pp. 133–8,165–86, 207–9.
11 Clarke, and Zuk, , ‘The Dynamics of Third-Party Support’, p. 196Google Scholar; Kramer, , ‘Short-term Fluctuations’, p. 136.Google Scholar
12 Hibbs, , The American Political Economy, pp. 79–80, 95–6, 107–8.Google Scholar
13 Okun, Arthur M., ‘Comments on Stigler's Paper’, American Economic Review, 63 (1973), 172–7, at p. 174Google Scholar; Stigler, , ‘General National Economic Conditions’Google Scholar; Mueller, Dennis C., Public Choice II: A Revised Edition of Public Choice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 297–8.Google Scholar
14 See in particular Arcelus, F. and Meltzer, A. H., ‘The Effect of Aggregate Economic Variables on Congressional Elections’, American Political Science Review, 69(1975), 1232–9, at p. 1234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Kramer, , ‘Short-term Fluctuations’; ‘General National Economic Conditions’Google Scholar and Arcelus, and Meltzer, , ‘The Effect of Aggregate Economic Variables’Google Scholar, for example, analyse elections to the House of Representatives between 1896 and 1964.
16 Kiewiet, and Rivers, , ‘A Retrospective’, p. 372Google Scholar; Hibbs, , The American Political Economy, p. 393.Google Scholar
17 Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 391–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Borooah, V. K. and van der Ploeg, F., Political Aspects of the Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 47–9, 56.Google Scholar
18 Stokes, Donald, ‘A Variance Components Model of Political Effects’, in Claunch, John M., ed., Mathematical Applications in Political Science (Dallas, Tex.: Arnold Foundation, 1965)Google Scholar; Stokes, Donald, ‘Parties and the Nationalization of Electoral Forces’, in Chambers, William Nisbet and Burnham, Walter Dean, eds, The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Kawato, Sadafumi, ‘Nationalization and Partisan Realignment in Congressional Elections’, American Political Science Review, 81 (1987), 1235–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Claggett, William, Flanigan, William and Zingale, Nancy, ‘Nationalization of the American Electorate’, American Political Science Review, 78 (1985), 77–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vertz, Laura L., Frendreis, John P. and Gibson, James L., ‘Nationalization of the Electorate in the United States’, American Political Science Review, 81 (1987), 961–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19 Owens, John R. and Olson, E., ‘Economic Fluctuations and Congressional Elections’, American Journal of Political Science, 24 (1980), 469–93, at p. 473.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 Owens, and Olson, , ‘Economic Fluctuations’, p. 475Google Scholar; Owens, and Wade, , ‘Economic Conditions’, p. 32Google Scholar; see also Toinet, Marie-France, ‘Economic Determinants and Electoral Outcomes: Some Personal Observations’, in Eulau, Heinz and Lewis-Beck, Michael S., eds, Economic Conditions and Electoral Outcomes: The United States and Western Europe (New York: Agathon Press, 1985), p. 237Google Scholar; Kiewiet, and Rivers, , ‘A Retrospective’, p. 387.Google Scholar
21 Owens, and Wade, , ‘Economic Conditions’, p. 32Google Scholar; see also Owens, and Olson, , ‘Economic Fluctuations’, pp. 475–6.Google Scholar
22 Hibbs, , The American Political Economy, pp. 143–63, 260.Google Scholar
23 Borooah, and van der Ploeg, , Political Aspects of the Economy, p. 59.Google Scholar
24 Hibbs, , The American Political Economy, pp. 262, 276, 291.Google Scholar
25 Hibbs, , The American Political Economy, p. 159.Google Scholar
26 See Mackie, Thomas T. and Rose, Richard, The International Almanac of Electoral History, rev. 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 These data also overcome the ‘boundary problem’. For a general discussion of this problem, see Wald, Kenneth, Crosses on the Ballot (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 74–81.Google Scholar See also Census of Canada, 1921, vol. I, p.xviiiGoogle Scholar; Census of Canada, 1931, vol. I, p. xxiGoogle Scholar; Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1931, pp. 8, 17–18.Google Scholar
28 Lipset, Seymour Martin, Agrarian Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), p. 29.Google Scholar
29 Campbell, Angus, Converse, Phillip, Miller, Warren and Stokes, Donald, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960), pp. 416–19.Google Scholar The nature of this relation has, however, changed over time. See in particular Lewis-Beck, Michael S., ‘Agrarian Political Behavior in the United States’, American Journal of Political Science, 21 (1977), 543–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sigelman, Lee, ‘Politics, Economics and the American Farmer: The Case of 1980’, Rural Sociology, 48 (1983), 367–85Google Scholar; and Sigelman, Lee, ‘Economic Pressure and the Farm Vote: The Case of 1984’, Rural Sociology, 52 (1987), 151–63.Google Scholar
30 Campbell, Angus et al. , The American Voter, pp. 406, 419–20.Google Scholar
31 Weatherford, M. Stephen, ‘Economic Voting and the “Symbolic Politics” Argument: A Reinterpretation and Synthesis’, American Political Science Review, 77 (1983), 158–74, at p. 162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
32 The source data appear in the annual editions of the Official Yearbook of the Commonwealth of Australia, The Canada Year Book and The New Zealand Official Yearbook.
33 Gough, Paul A., ‘Economic Conditions and Congressional Elections: An Attempt to Control for the Depression’, American Politics Quarterly, 12 (1984), 71–88, at p. 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frey, Bruno S. and Week, Hannelore, ‘A Statistical Study of the Effect of the Great Depression on Elections: The Weimar Republic, 1930–1933’, Political Behavior, 5 (1983), 403–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34 Green, Donald Philip, ‘The Price Elasticity of Mass Preferences’, American Political Science Review, 86(1992), 128–48, at p. 129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
35 Lipsey, Richard G., An Introduction to Positive Economics, 2nd edn (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), pp. 116–23.Google Scholar
36 See, for example, Stone, Richard, The Measurement of Consumers' Expenditure and Behaviour in the United Kingdom 1920–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954).Google Scholar
37 See also Mayhew, Anne, ‘A Reappraisal of Farm Protest Movements in the US’, Journal of Economic History, 32 (1972), 464–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGuire, Robert A., ‘Economic Causes of Late-Nineteenth Century Unrest: New Evidence’, Journal of Economic History, 41 (1981), 835–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Williams, Jeffrey C., ‘Economics and Politics: Voting Behavior in Kansas During the Populist Decade’, Explorations in Economic History, 18 (1981), 233–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
38 See Peffley, Mark, ‘The Voter as Juror: Attributing Responsibility for Economic Conditions’Google Scholar, in Eulau, and Lewis-Beck, , eds, Economic Conditions and Electoral Outcomes.Google Scholar
39 Rosenstone, , Behr, and Lazarus, , Third Parties in America, p. 127.Google Scholar
40 Mazmanian, Daniel, Third Parties in Presidential Elections (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1974), pp. 27, 71 and 137Google Scholar; see also Fisher, Stephen L., The Minor Parties of the Federal Republic of Germany: Toward a Comparative Theory of Minor Parties (The Hague: Martinuus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kramer, , ‘Short-term Fluctuations’, p. 136Google Scholar; Rosenstone, , Behr, and Lazarus, , Third Parties in America, pp. 134–8.Google Scholar
41 Graham, Bruce D., The Formation of the Australian Country Parties (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1966), pp. 1–28Google Scholar; Young, Walter D., Democracy and Discontent: Progressivism, Socialism and Social Credit in the Canadian West (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1969), pp. 1–14Google Scholar; Graham, Bruce D., ‘The Country Party Idea in New Zealand Politics’, in Chapman, Robert and Sinclair, Keith, eds, Studies of a Small Democracy (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1963), pp. 182–5.Google Scholar
42 Graham, , The Formation of the Australian Country PartiesGoogle Scholar; Lipset, , Agrarian Socialism, pp. 73–89Google Scholar; Brooking, Thomas, ‘Economic Transformation’, in Oliver, W. H. and Williams, B. R., eds, The Oxford History of New Zealand (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 217–27.Google Scholar
43 Each constituency in Australia consists of approximately thirty subdivisions. Each constituency in Canada consists of approximately 100 polling divisions, and each constituency in New Zealand consists, on average, of two counties.
44 I choose these three third parties because they contested most elections between the Wars and because they were the most prominent third parties in rural parts of their respective countries. I choose these major parties because they existed continuously throughout the inter-war years and because they formed no pacts or coalitions with these third parties. Their principal opponents (namely, the Nationalist party and United Australia party in Australia; the Liberal party in Canada; and the Reform party, Liberal/United party and National party in New Zealand) do not fulfil these criteria.
45 The social structural variables are ‘grouping variables’ which mitigate the incidence of aggregation bias in the model. See Langbein, Laura I. and Lichtman, Allan J., Sage University Series on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, no. 07–001: Ecological Inference (Beverley Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1976), pp. 11, 15–25.Google Scholar
46 Each observation has been weighted by the number of voters on the electoral roll in the polling division. See Hanushek, Eric A. and Jackson, John E., Statistical Methods for Social Scientists (New York: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 195–8.Google Scholar
47 Precise figures appear at the foot of Tables 2–5.
48 See, for example, Jacobson, Gary C. and Kernell, Samuel, Strategy and Choice in Congressional Elections, 2nd edn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Rosenstone, , Behr, and Lazarus, , Third Parties in America, chap. 8.Google Scholar
49 These inferences may be incorrect because one can observe a party's vote only in the subconstituency units in which candidates stood for election. Such inferences thus ignore the behaviour of voters who would have voted for these candidates if they had stood in the sub-constituency unit in which they resided. See Achen, Christopher, The Statistical Analysis of Quasi-Experiments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 73–95Google Scholar; Heckman, John, ‘Sample Selection Bias as Specification Error’, Econometrica, 47 (1979), 153–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nelson, Forrest D., ‘Censored Regression Models with Unobserved Stochastic Censoring Thresholds’, Journal of Econometrics, 6 (1977), 309–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
50 The formal model consists in an unobserved random variable, z*, which represents the candidate's propensity to contest a particular constituency. The observed counterpart of z*, the actual presence or absence of the candidate, is z. If one sets the unobserved threshold of z* to 0, then one can write z = 1 if z* > 0; z = 0 if z* ≤0. One thus observes the vote only when z = 1, and can express this vote as Y = 1/[1 + exp(–β''X)], z = 1/[1 + exp(– a′ V)]; z = 1, if z* > 0; z = 0 if z* ≤ 0. One mitigates the selection bias problem by applying the standard binary logit analysis to z in order to estimate the coefficients of a; by computing the quantity λ = φ(a′V)/Φ for each observation; and by appending λ to the matrix of independent variables, X, and performing the standard binomial logit analysis. One requires an identification condition in order to estimate models such as these. One variable, voter turnout in the sub-constituency unit, has been included in the V matrix and excluded from the X matrix.
51 Achen, , The Statistical Analysis of Quasi-Experiments, pp. 97–137.Google Scholar
52 The New Zealand election of 1922 has been excluded from the analysis because reliable information about the party affiliations of the candidates who stood at that election are not available. Further, the Progressive party disbanded between the 1930 and 1935 elections; accordingly, results for this party do not appear at the 1935 election.
53 Popkin, Samuel et al. , ‘Comment: What Have You Done for Me Lately? Toward An Investment Theory of Voting’, American Political Science Review, 70 (1976) 782–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
54 A full description of the procedure which generated these results appears in King, Gary, Unifying Political Methodology: The Likelihood Theory of Statistical Significance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 102–10.Google Scholar
55 Fiorina, Morris P., ‘Economic Retrospective Voting in American Elections: A Microanalysis’, American Journal of Political Science, 22 (1978), 426–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Radcliff, Benjamin, ‘Solving A Puzzle: Aggregate Analysis and Economic Voting Revisited’, Journal of Politics, 50 (1988), 440–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
56 Hibbs, , The American Political Economy, pp. 43–62, 127–43, 175–82, 259–60Google Scholar; see also Weatherford, M. Stephen, ‘Economic Conditions and Electoral Outcomes: Class Differences in the Political Response to Recession’, American Journal of Political Science, 72 (1978), 917–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
57 See, for example, Norpoth, Helmut, ‘Economics, Politics and the Cycle of Presidential Popularity’, Political Behavior, 6 (1984), 252–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whiteley, Paul, ‘Macroeconomic Performance and Government Popularity in Britain: The Short-Run Dynamics’, European Journal of Political Research, 14 (1986), 45–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yantek, Thomas, ‘Government Popularity in Great Britain Under Conditions of Economic Decline’, Political Studies, 33 (1985), 467–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clarke, Harold D. and Zuk, Gary, ‘The Politics of Party Popularity: Canada 1974–1979’, Comparative Politics, 19 (1987), 299–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
