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Conventional wisdom suggests that occupational class plays a limited role in explaining vote choice in Iceland. In this paper, we argue that the death of class in Icelandic politics may be premature and that it still plays a role in structuring political preferences and party choice. While the importance of the traditional class cleavage may have declined to the point of irrelevance, we suggest that there is a new type of class voting in Iceland, containing both a vertical and a horizontal component. Furthermore, we argue that the Great Recession played a critical role in increasing the strength of class voting around this new class schema, both because of the conflict around economic issues it generated, but also because of its facilitation of the formation and success of new parties. We test our main hypotheses using multinomial logistic regression on data from the Icelandic National Election Study from 1999 to 2016 and apply a modified measure of cleavage strength, which we refer to as "Full Kappa". Our results suggest that class voting is alive and well in Iceland and that its strength has increased following the Great Recession.

Grant and Lebo (2016) and Keele, Linn, and Webb (2016) provide diverging recommendations to analysts working with short time series that are potentially fractionally integrated. While Grant and Lebo are quite positive about the prospects of fractionally differencing such data, Keele, Linn, and Webb argue that estimates of fractional integration will be highly uncertain in short time series. In this study, I simulate fractionally integrated data and compare estimates from the general error correction model (GECM), which disregards fractional integration, to models using fractional integration methods over thirty-two simulation conditions. I find that estimates of short-run effects are similar across the two models, but that models using fractionally differenced data produce superior predictions of long-run effects for all sample sizes when there are no short-run dynamics included. When short-run dynamics are included, the GECM outperforms the alternative model, but only in time series that consist of under 250 observations.

The Panama Papers disclosures in April 2016 revealed information about tax avoidance and fraud among political elites and the wealthy on a global scale. But did the disclosures affect relevant political attitudes and behavior, including perceptions of corruption, redistributive preferences, and voting intentions? We leverage nationally representative surveys that were in the field at the time in two heavily impacted countries, France and Spain, and treat the disclosures as a natural experiment, comparing respondents questioned just before and just after the disclosures. Our design highlights the difficulty, at times, of interpreting natural experiments, given the potentially compounded treatments that arise as events unfold over time, and the common inability to properly determine views prior to the treatment. That said, the analysis indicates that the disclosures had limited effects on the domains most likely affected by such a scandal, consistent with them being interpreted based on existing beliefs and identities. Our results thus contradict prior findings which suggest that the Panama Papers had substantial effects on redistributive attitudes, and shed further light on voters' learning and updating around uncertain, yet emotionally laden, political facts.

AbstractIncome and political attitudes are powerfully correlated in cross‐sectional data, yet research based on panel data finds at most a weak correlation. In this paper, we examine this puzzling pattern by exploring the long‐term evolution of attitudes over the life cycle. We evaluate the predictions of five different explanations on the relationship between attitudes and income experiences. These explanations focus on, respectively: socialization, anticipation, myopic self‐interest, learning and status maximization. We employ accelerated longitudinal design models using data on core political values that span up to sixteen years from the British Household Panel Survey. Our findings reconcile the mixed evidence in the literature: the correlation between income and political attitudes, strong in cross‐sectional studies but weak in short panel studies, emerges because attitudes crystallize – slowly but systematically – as income evolves over the life cycle. This pattern is most consistent with the learning explanation.

We argue that occupational unemployment rates, by informing perceptions of economic insecurity, serve as a salient and powerful heuristic for aggregate economic performance. Consequently, high and rising occupational unemployment leads to negative evaluations of the economy and reduces the probability of supporting the incumbent government. Simultaneously, however, such changes shift support toward left-wing parties. Thus, economic insecurity serves as a valence issue, but is also inherently a positional issue, due to the distributional consequences of welfare policies. This brings about a potential conflict as under left-wing incumbent governments the economically insecure are cross-pressured, which increases their likelihood of exiting the electoral arena completely. We test our hypotheses using a Bayesian hierarchical multinomial model, with individual-level data from 43 elections in 21 countries. We find support for the hypothesized effects of employment insecurity on voting behavior, with a follow-up analysis supporting the posited informational mechanism.

In recent years, political science has seen a boom in the use of sophisticated methodological tools for time series analysis. One such tool is the general error correction model (GECM), originally introduced to political scientists in the pages of this journal over 20 years ago (Durr 1992; Ostrom and Smith 1992) and re-introduced by De Boef and Keele (2008), who advocate its use for a wider set of time series data than previously considered appropriate. Their article has proven quite influential, with numerous papers justifying their methodological choices with reference to De Boef and Keele's contribution.Grant and Lebo (2016) take issue with the increasing use of the GECM in political science and argue that the methodology is widely misused and abused by practitioners. Given the recent surge of research conducted using error correction methods, there is every reason to take their suggestions seriously and provide a fuller discussion of the points they raise in their paper. The present symposium serves such a role. It consists of Grant and Lebo's critique, a detailed response by Keele, Linn, and Webb (2016b), and shorter comments by Esarey (2016), Freeman (2016), and Helgason (2016). Finally, Lebo and Grant (2016) and Keele, Linn, and Webb (2016a) reflect on the contributions made in the symposium, as well as discuss outstanding issues.

This book examines to what extent politics in Iceland have been transformed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The book focuses on whether the short-term sudden shock caused by the Great Recession has permanently transformed politics, political behaviour and the Icelandic party system or whether its effect was primarily transitory. These questions remain highly relevant to the wider field of political science, as the book examines under what circumstances sudden shocks lead to permanent changes in a political system. As such, the book situates the post-crisis Icelandic case both temporally and comparatively and evaluates to what extent the Iceland experience is reflective of broader patterns found in other Western democracies, particularly those other countries that were also hard hit by the Great Recession (e.g. Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy). This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Nordic politics, Icelandic politics and society, electoral studies, political parties and party systems, representative democracy, political behaviour and more broadly to European and comparative politics.

We present an analysis of the 2021 Althingi election in Iceland based on several key indicators obtained from the post-election voter survey of the Icelandic National Election Study (ICENES). The overall question we seek to address concerns the degree to which Icelandic politics have continued to move towards either recovery or transformation after the political and economic upheavals of 2008. The 2021 campaign and election were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the government enjoyed high support across the political spectrum for its handling of the outbreak and its economic consequences. The election resulted in the coalition parties increasing their vote share by 1.5 percentage points. Based on the ICENES data, we find that 45% of voters switched parties in 2021, compared with 2017, which is slightly lower than in previous elections. On the issue dimensions of state–market and integration–isolation, we observe a sharp return towards more pro-market and pro-integration attitudes, respectively. Trust in politicians and satisfaction with how democracy works continued to increase from an all-time low in 2009. We also observe that the youngest age groups continued to be least likely to vote, spent less time following the campaign and were more inclined to follow news on social media. We conclude that Icelandic politics seem to have reached a balance after the crisis, albeit a new balance that is characterised by a more fragmented party system than before.