How Voters Evaluate Party Competence: A Comparison Between Parties In and Out of Power

Accounts of general election outcomes increasingly talk about voters comparing parties in terms of their perceived competence to manage the economy and public services. This raises the question of how voters form evaluations of party competence. Whilst it is assumed that voters form evaluations of the incumbent based on the signals provided by its current performance in office it is less clear how, in the absence of such a performance record, voters might evaluate the potential competence of the opposition. Using data from the British Election Panel Studies this paper models the process by which voters form evaluations of parties’ competence to manage the economy and compares results across incumbent and opposition parties. On the basis of evidence from general elections 1992-2001 the paper demonstrates that the process of evaluation formation does differ between parties in and out of power with retrospective evaluations of economic performance influencing evaluations of the former but not the latter. Nevertheless, the paper also demonstrates that voters are capable of forming evaluations of the opposition which are more than a simple mirror image of their evaluations of the incumbent. In the absence of an up to date performance record these evaluations are based on long term partisan and ideological predispositions and the cues provided by party leaders. Note: I would like to thank Geoffrey Evans, Steve Fisher and John Curtice for helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties branch of the Political Studies Association held in Oxford 10-12 September 2004 Introduction Accounts of general election outcomes increasingly talk about parties in terms of their “fitness to govern” or their perceived competence to manage the economy and public services. It is assumed that, to some extent at least, voters make comparisons between parties in this respect; rather than simply voting for or against the incumbent depending on whether or not they are satisfied with that party’s performance in office, voters also take into account the likely prospects for the future if the opposition were to be elected and vote against the government only if they perceive there to be a credible alternative available (King 1997). In the field of economic voting in particular there are a number of studies which emphasise the importance of relative economic competence (Sanders 1996, 1999). According to these studies, party choice depends not so much on the economic performance of the current government but rather on an assessment of the relative capabilities of the incumbent and opposition parties to manage the economy in the future. This raises the important question of whether and how voters form their evaluations of relative party competence. In order to make use of such comparative judgements in deciding how to vote voters must first be able to form meaningful evaluations of the relative capabilities of the different parties to manage the economy and assess what each party would do if they were to be elected. This may be relatively straightforward in the case of the incumbent where the voter has access to a current performance record to serve as a guide. However, it is less clear how voters might form corresponding evaluations about the opposition in the absence of such information being available. Increasingly, models of vote choice recognise that the traditional assumption of a fully informed, homogenous electorate is flawed. In the field of economic voting, for example, there is a growing body of literature which considers how the presence of informational asymmetries may affect both evaluations of economic performance and the process by which these evaluations are formed. To date, the literature has tended to concentrate on individual level heterogeneity and how informational asymmetries arising from different levels of political sophistication, media consumption etc. may influence economic evaluations (Hetherington 1996; Duch et al 2000). It has been argued, for example, that less informed voters are more likely than better informed voters to rely on partisanship or their own personal economic experiences when forming evaluations of the national economy (Conover et al 1986; Duch and Palmer 2002). However, it is important to recognise that informational asymmetries may exist between parties as well as across individuals. The incumbency or opposition status of parties, and the fact that voters have recent experience of living under on party but not the other, provides one potentially important source of information asymmetry which may affect the ability of voters to form evaluations about the capabilities of these different parties to manage the economy. This in turn may have important consequences in terms of the relative capacity for incumbent and opposition parties to exert influence over voter choices and election outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to model the process by which voters’ form evaluations of parties’ economic competence and in particular to consider how voters might go about forming evaluations of the opposition in the absence of a current performance record. In doing so the paper hopes both to be able to improve our understanding of the role that opposition parties play in voter decision making and to contribute to the growing literature on heterogeneity in vote choice. The analysis in the paper makes use of data from the British Election Panel Studies which, as well as the more usual questions asking respondents for their retrospective and prospective evaluations of the economy in general, also ask voters for their separate evaluations concerning the prospects for the economy if each of the main parties were to be election. On the basis of evidence from the 1992 1997 and 2001 general elections the paper demonstrates that the process of evaluation formation does differ between parties in and out of power with retrospective evaluations of economic performance influencing incumbent evaluations but not those of the opposition. Nevertheless, the paper also demonstrates that voters are capable of forming evaluations of the opposition which are more than a simple mirror image of their evaluations of the incumbent. In the absence of an up to date performance record these evaluations are based on long term partisan and ideological predispositions and the cues provided by party leaders. The rest of the paper proceeds as follows: Sections 2 and 3 review the existing literature on forming economic evaluations and outline some hypotheses regarding how this process may differ between parties in and out of power. Section 4 discusses the choice of dependent variable and the data to be used in the analysis. Sections 5 and 6 present and discuss the results of a multivariate analysis of economic evaluations comparing the results obtained for incumbent and opposition parties. Section 7