The department of political science at Université Laval, the Chaire de recherche sur la démocratie et les institutions parlementaires, the Centre d’analyse des politiques publiques, the Groupe de recherche en communication politique and the Centre for the Study of Democratic citizenship present:
Prosperity V. Policy: Comparing the two faces of economic voting
Michael S. Lewis-Beck (University of Ioawa)
Classically, economic voting means voters reward or punish the government for economic boom or bust. This model holds the economy to be a valence issue, where everyone agrees on the goal of prosperity. Of course, the economic vote may instead be positional, with voters disagreeing about economic policy, such as progressive taxation. We know a lot about valence economic voting , but much less about positional economic voting. Here we examine the two types, assessing their effects in a comparative election survey from seven leading democracies: Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We conclude, perhaps surprisingly, that positional economic voting carries as much weight as valence economic voting.
Michael S. Lewis-Beck is F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa. His interests are comparative elections, election forecasting, political economy, and quantitative methodology. Professor Lewis-Beck has authored or co-authored over 275 articles and books, including Economics and Elections, The American Voter Revisited, French Presidential Elections, Forecasting Elections, Latin American Elections: Choice and Change and Applied Regression. He has served as Editor of the American Journal of Political Science and of the Sage QASS series (the green monographs) in quantitative methods. Currently he is Associate Editor of International Journal of Forecasting and of French Politics.
A light lunch will be served