Perceptions of Competence and the European Economic Crisis

• Author: Luigi Manzetti,Giacomo Chiozza
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912915595629
• Published date: 01 September 2015
• Date: 01 September 2015
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

2015, Vol. 68(3) 457 –473

© 2015 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912915595629

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Article

Introduction

In 2014, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi won an outstand-

ing victory in the European Parliament and local elec-

tions in Italy (Davies 2014; Sala 2014). Considering that

his party had been identified by voters as supportive of

unpopular austerity measures, this was a major accom-

plishment. The literature on economic voting would have

predicted a much worse result for Renzi. The puzzle is,

then, how could Renzi pull it off? To answer this ques-

tion, we develop a set of hypotheses that explains how

voters evaluate incumbent leaders in democracies with

highly integrated economies.

In a nutshell, we argue that the voters of globalized

democracies discount current economic conditions in

evaluating incumbents if they perceive incumbents mov-

ing their countries in the right direction. If people believe

that their leaders show the capability of steering their

countries toward a better future making the best out of a

constrained situation, we should expect economic voting

considerations to be of little importance as a means of

democratic accountability. Since citizens find their

incumbents less and less in control of their countries’ eco-

nomic fate in globalized economies, the basis of their

evaluation is the “perceived competency” of the incum-

bent in moving the country forward, or more simply, the

incumbent’s political leadership. Under globalization,

therefore, the link that connects the state of the economy

with citizens’ political support for politicians, particularly

incumbents, gets blurred to be replaced by broader

valence considerations.

By analyzing micro-level processes that voters use to

assess incumbents’ performance, our study contributes to

a growing literature that has contended that economic

voting—that is, the notion that “the citizen votes for the

government if the economy is doing all right; otherwise,

the vote is against” (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000,

183)—is affected by a variety of contextual, mediating

factors, which substantially weaken its relevance. The

emergence of globalization and its consequences in the

past two decades is one of such factors, which affects

micro-levels considerations (Cerny 2010; Hellwig 2001,

2007, 2008; Hellwig and Samuels 2007; Vowles and

Xezonakis 2010).

The weakening of the link between economic condi-

tions and electoral success has unsurprisingly raised con-

cerns about the foundations of representative democracy

595629PRQXXX10.1177/1065912915595629Political Research QuarterlyChiozza and Manzetti

research-article2015

1Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

2Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Giacomo Chiozza, Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt

University, 230 Appleton Place, PMB 0505, Nashville, TN 37203-5721,

USA.

Email: giacomo.chiozza@gmail.com

Perceptions of Competence and the

European Economic Crisis: A

Micro-Level Analysis

Giacomo Chiozza1 and Luigi Manzetti2

Abstract

This study provides micro-level evidence for the new theories of accountability under globalization. We analyze the

micro-level logic that underpins political accountability in democratic countries with highly globalized economies.

We contend that voters discount current economic conditions in evaluating incumbent leaders if they perceive the

incumbent leader moving the country in the right direction. We test this argument with survey data from eight

European countries in 2012, while controlling for potential alternative explanations associated with pocketbook,

sociotropic, and clarity-of-responsibility factors. We find that valence considerations related to future directions in the

country sustain positive evaluations of leaders’ performance even in the face of negative evaluations of the economy.

Keywords

economic voting, electoral accountability, 2008 financial crisis, European politics, economic globalization, conditional

tree models

458 Political Research Quarterly 68(3)

under globalization (Anderson 2007; Maloy 2014). By

illustrating the importance of leaders’ perceived compe-

tency, therefore, we temper the most pessimistic conclu-

sions about representation in globalized democracies.

Although voters, as the sovereign agents in a democratic

polity, can base their vote choices on any parameters they

desire (Manin, Przeworski, and Stokes 1999, 44), they

are not yet turning a blind eye to how their leaders might

make a difference for the future prospects of their coun-

tries. In globalized democracies, voters still strive to exert

control over their governments. But rather than relying

upon a retrospective evaluation based on performance,

they rely upon prospective, valence-oriented, judgments.

In this perspective, elections work as mechanisms to

select “good types” of leaders (Fearon 1999).

We test our argument with an analysis of survey data

from eight European countries in 2012. Since the finan-

cial crisis of 2008–2009, voters have experienced the

harsh face of globalization. The logic of retribution for

bad times should be highly salient. But, as Magalhães

(2014, 132) points out, that would be too simplistic an

assessment of the electoral outcomes of 2012 and 2013 in

Europe. By evaluating how voters assessed the perfor-

mance of their leaders in dealing with the European eco-

nomic crisis of 2008–2009, we identify the sources of

leaders’ “perceived competency” in adverse conditions

under globalization.

Consistently with our expectations, we uncover evi-

dence suggesting that leadership factors offset the poten-

tial negative effects of what has been the most severe

economic crisis since the Great Depression. In and of

itself, this finding illustrates the new dynamics of politi-

cal accountability under the vastly changed international

political economy conditions of the twenty-first century.

This finding can also help politicians to devise new strat-

egies for electoral success. When voters recognize the

constraints imposed by globalization on aggregate eco-

nomic outcomes, successful politicians are those who can

provide a vision and project that can move their countries

forward, as was the case for Renzi in the 2014 European

and local elections.

We proceed in four steps. First, we provide an over-

view of the literature on accountability and globalization,

which then leads to the formulation of our hypotheses.

Second, we describe our data and empirical strategy. We

estimate a series of conditional tree models, a class of

models from the statistical learning approach that is par-

ticularly appropriate to identify interaction effects

(Breiman et al. 1984; Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman

2001; Hothorn, Hornik, and Zeileis 2006; James et al.

2013; Strobl, Malley and Tutz 2009). Third, we present

our findings and discuss their relations to the broader lit-

erature on accountability under globalization. In our con-

clusion, we assess the contributions of this study to the

current academic debate on globalization and account-

ability and describe further avenues of research.

Globalization and Accountability

In a liberal democracy, accountability rests on the notion

that, in the public realm, rulers respond to the citizenry

for their actions (Maloy 2014; Przeworski, Stokes, and

Manin 1999; Schumpeter 1976). The most direct form

that citizens have to enforce accountability is elections.

Since the 1970s, however, public opinion polls have

increasingly served as important proxies to keep elected

officials under check in non-electoral years (Hutchings

2003). Elections and public opinion polls, thus, create a

mechanism that makes elected officials responsive to

their constituents’ preferences.

Although voters are in general marginally informed of

the activities of their representatives, they nonetheless

can enforce electoral discipline by assessing a few pivotal

parameters, economic conditions in particular. In this per-

spective, economic voting works as a mechanism of dem-

ocratic accountability since economic conditions are the

most tangible factor to which citizens can intuitively

relate when they assess an incumbent’s performance.

Accordingly, a large literature has emerged to explain

the “inner” workings of economic voting (Hibbs 2006;

Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000). This literature, which

harks back to the foundational insights in Downs’s (1957)

theory of democracy, burgeoned in the 1970s and 1980s

along three major schools of thought:

 Pocketbook (or egotropic) voting refers to rational

evaluations of government or incumbents based

upon an individual’s personal financial situation

rather than the country’s as a whole (Fiorina 1978);

 Sociotropic voting refers to rational assessments

supporting or punishing a government or incum-

bents based upon the status of the national econ-

omy (Chappell and Keech 1985; Kiewiet 1981;

Lewis-Beck 1988); and

 Clarity of responsibility hypothesis according to

which voters hold incumbents accountable if they

can clearly attribute responsibility for poor eco-

nomic conditions to them (Powell and Whitten

1993; Tavits 2007).

These schools of thought may take a prospective view,

whereby voters reward or punish governments or incum-

bents based upon what they expect them to do in the

future on certain issues, and a retrospective view, whereby

voters vote as a reaction to past performance. Over time,

the scholarly interest on these issues has increased tre-

mendously. By the mid-2000s, roughly four hundred aca-

demic works had appeared on economic voting alone