Collaborative Research: Why the Economy? The Micro-Foundations of the Economic Vote in Comparative Perspective

合作研究：为什么是经济？

• 批准号: 0215635
• 负责人: Randolph Stevenson
• 金额: $ 9.99万
• 依托单位: William Marsh Rice University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2002
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2002-07-01 至 2005-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0215635&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Why; Economy; Micro

An important puzzle in the study of comparative political behavior is the apparent variability, across countries and over time, of the extent and nature of economic influences on political support for parties and politicians. In this proposal, the Principal Investigators offer a theoretical solution to this puzzle and outline a plan for testing it empirically. The theoretical solution departs from previous work on comparative economic voting because it draws heavily on relatively recent insights into the nature, sources, and impact of information on public opinion (Zaller 1992,2001; Mutz 1998; Lupia and McCubbins 1998; Iyengar 1991; Page and Shapiro 1992; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Such work differs from earlier literature in two ways. First, it assigns a dominant role to the media in communicating information to citizens and ultimately in influencing their political opinions and behavior. Second, it accounts for individual heterogeneity in political opinion and behavior largely through differences in people's incentive and ability to receive and accept media messages (i.e., their political awareness). Most of the insights of this literature, however, have not yet penetrated the comparative study of economic voting, which has maintained quite simple conceptions of the cognitive process that leads to the empirical phenomenon of economic voting. This is perhaps the reason that the leading explanation for cross-national difference in economic voting, the "clarity of responsibility" hypothesis, has had only limited empirical success. In this project, the Principal Investigators offer a more nuanced theoretical model of economic voting that builds on the recent literature in American public opinion (which is itself an outgrowth of advances in cognitive psychology). The Principal Investigators begin with the usual economic voting model, but recognize that it is really built from a series of connected opinions (i.e., an economic judgment, an attribution of responsibility for the economy, and an expression of political support). Consequently, a fruitful way of building a more fully realized model of economic voting would be to flesh out the explanation of how voters form and change each of these opinions. Fortunately, the public opinion literature mentioned above provides a general theoretical framework from which these opinion models can be built. This theoretical expansion of the economic voting model accommodates a number of the most prominent, but more ad hoc, hypotheses about comparative economic voting already in the literature, but it also generates a whole range of new theoretical hypotheses. Indeed, this theory promises to reorient students of comparative economic voting away from an exclusive focus on governmental institutions and party systems as the sources of difference in cross-national economic voting; and toward a focus on international differences in how the media reports on the economy. In addition, the theory produces a number of new sources of individual level heterogeneity in economic voting that (because of difference in the distribution of these characteristics in different populations) could also help explain variation in economic voting cross nationally. In order to explore whether this kind of theoretical expansion is useful the Principal Investigators will need to collect data on what the media in different countries say about the economy over time. To do this, the Principal Investigators will collect about 30,000 front-pages of selected newspapers from 15 developed democracies from 1980-2001. These papers will be copied and coded for economic (and some political) messages by native language speakers. The project will also require information at the individual level. Many of the hypotheses specify relationships between variables like political awareness and economic judgments, political support, or responsibility attributions. To test these, the Principal Investigators need to ask a series of survey questions to citizens in different countries. The Principal Investigators will accomplish this inexpensively, by including a relatively short battery of the relevant items on the Gallup surveys conducted in each country.

比较政治行为研究中的一个重要难题是，经济对政党和政治家的政治支持的影响程度和性质在不同国家和不同时间存在明显的差异。在这个建议中，主要研究者提供了一个理论上的解决方案，并概述了一个计划，以测试它的经验。理论上的解决方案偏离了以前的工作比较经济投票，因为它大量借鉴了相对较新的见解的性质，来源和影响的信息对公众舆论（Zaller 1992，2001; Mutz 1998; Lupia和McCubbins 1998; Iyengar 1991; Page和Shapiro 1992; Delli Carpini和Keeter 1996）。这种作品与早期的文学作品有两个不同之处。 首先，它赋予媒体在向公民传播信息并最终影响其政治观点和行为方面的主导作用。 其次，它主要通过人们接受和接受媒体信息的动机和能力的差异来解释政治观点和行为的个体异质性（即，政治意识）。然而，这些文献中的大多数见解还没有渗透到经济投票的比较研究中，经济投票的比较研究一直保持着导致经济投票经验现象的认知过程的相当简单的概念。这也许就是为什么对经济投票中的跨国差异的主要解释，“责任清晰”假设，只有有限的经验成功。在这个项目中，主要研究人员提供了一个更加微妙的经济投票理论模型，该模型建立在美国公众舆论的最新文献基础上（这本身就是认知心理学进步的产物）。主要研究者开始与通常的经济投票模型，但认识到它真正是建立在一系列相连的意见（iidoEe.，经济判断、经济责任归属和政治支持的表达）。因此，建立一个更充分实现的经济投票模型的一个富有成效的方法是充实选民如何形成和改变这些观点的解释。幸运的是，上面提到的民意文献提供了一个一般的理论框架，这些意见模型可以建立。经济投票模型的这种理论扩展包含了一些最突出的，但更特别的，关于比较经济投票的假设已经在文献中，但它也产生了一系列新的理论假设。事实上，这一理论有望将比较经济投票的学生从仅仅关注政府机构和政党制度作为跨国经济投票差异的来源，转向关注媒体如何报道经济的国际差异。此外，该理论还产生了一些新的经济投票中个体水平异质性的来源（由于这些特征在不同人群中的分布差异），这些来源也有助于解释经济投票的全国性差异。为了探索这种理论扩展是否有用，首席研究员需要收集不同国家媒体对经济的长期看法的数据。为此，主要调查员将收集15个发达民主国家1980-2001年期间选定报纸的约30 000个头版。这些论文将由母语人士复制和编码，以传达经济（和一些政治）信息。该项目还需要个人一级的信息。许多假设指定变量之间的关系，如政治意识和经济判断，政治支持，或责任归因。为了测试这些，主要研究人员需要向不同国家的公民提出一系列调查问题。主要调查员将通过在每个国家进行的盖洛普调查中纳入一组相对较短的相关项目来廉价地完成这一工作。