Pundits have often claimed, but scholars have never found, that partisan swings in the vote abroad predict electoral fortunes at home. Employing semiannual Eurobarometer data on vote intention in eight European countries, this article provides statistical evidence of international comovement in partisan vote intention and its provenance in international business cycles. Electoral support for "luxury parties," those parties associated with higher spending and taxation, covaries across countries together with the business cycle. Both the domestic and international components of at least one economic aggregate—unemployment—prove a strong predictor of shifts in domestic vote intention. Globalization, by driving business cycle integration, is also synchronizing partisan cycles.
Studies of how economic globalization influences domestic politics have disproportionately focused on questions of policy rather than politics. Recently, however, a number of studies have examined how economic globalization influences politics-specifically electoral politics. This article surveys these new studies, which have often appeared in disparate research areas, and argues that they constitute considerable evidence that international economic integration influences seemingly domestic political processes. Adapted from the source document.
Do trade-transmitted international business cycles affect the timing of national elections? This article shows that export expansions do not differ substantively from booms in aggregate output in inviting opportunistic governments to call elections, especially as their terms mature. Further analysis confirms two ancillary implications of this relationship: (a) that clusters of countries tend to hold elections in periods of international economic expansion and (b) that national election cycles, much like business cycles, have become more correlated over time, most prominently in Europe. The findings in this article raise implications for continued economic integration: freer movement of goods, services and capital may imply more correlated business cycles and, by extension, election cycles.
In a recent article, Rogowski and Kayser introduced a claim to the political economy literature that majoritarian electoral systems: (a) systematically privilege consumers relative to producers and, consequently, (b) reduce real prices. The authors, modifying an established model of regulation, showed that, within a competitive political system, politicians favour those who provide only votes (consumers) over those who provide both money and votes (producers). When producers provide only money, the intuition becomes apparent even without a model: politicians respond more to voters under (majoritarian) systems in which a small change in vote share can produce a large change in seat share. Cross-sectional evidence for the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries in 1990 was strongly supportive, suggesting that real prices were, all else equal, about 10 per cent lower in the averageOECDcountry with single-member district (SMD) electoral systems than in those that used some form of proportional representation (PR).As with all new empirical claims, healthy scepticism is warranted. Indeed, recent research in related areas has to be contrasted with – but it has not contradicted – these price results, associating proportional electoral arrangements with more positive social welfare outcomes including (a) less income inequality, (b) higher public spending, or, in combination with central banking institutions, (c) greater price stability. We acknowledge the possible incongruity of these results with those of Rogowski and Kayser; after all, verification of the price effects would suggest a more complicated relationship between electoral institutions and social welfare than is indicated in the extant literature.
In a recent article, Rogowski and Kayser introduced a claim to the political economy literature that majoritarian electoral systems: (a) systematically privilege consumers relative to producers and consequently, (b) reduce real pries. The authors, modifying an established model of regulation showed that, within a competitive political system, politicians favor those who provide only votes over those who provide both money and votes. When producers provide only money, the intuition become apparent even without a model: politicians respond more to voters under systems in which a small change in vote share can produce a large change in seat share. Cross-sectional evidence for the OECD countries in 1990 was strongly supportive, suggesting that real prices were, all else equal, about 10 percent lower in the average OECD country with single-member district electoral systems than in those that used some form of proportional representation. The relationship observed between electoral systems and prices in Rogowski and Kayser could prove anomalous, spurious, or unfounded for too many reasons. As a necessary prologue to the data analysis, the author next considered issues of measurement and of model specification. The author also showed the panel data and the empirical testing in detail. Different model was tested.
