Government Performance, Valence Judgments, and The Dynamics of Party Support

该研究项目增进了对民主政体中政党支持的动态和决定因素的了解。 研究的一个方面涉及提供公共服务和政党支持总量之间的动态关系。 意识形态色彩各异的执政党敏锐地意识到了这些关系的重要性，它们一再试图不仅加强公共服务的供应，而且抑制选民对公共服务的需求。 后一种努力取得的成功相对较少。 许多选民仍然相信，政府可以而且应该大力参与教育、卫生、福利和交通等领域的事务，私有化计划往往会出问题，当公共服务质量低下或根本无法提供时，政府负有责任。 然而，迄今为止，对影响政党支持总体动态的因素的研究主要集中在经济条件和各种“一次性”政治事件的影响上，实际上几乎完全集中在经济条件和各种“一次性”政治事件的影响上。 现有的研究将注意力限制在经济状况和突出事件上，忽视了公众对政府在各种高度突出的政策领域（如医疗保健、教育和国家安全）表现的反应的后果。 基于早期研究的主要研究者和同事进行的政党支持的决定因素的结果，该研究将指定和测试竞争对手的模型如何在几个重要的政策领域的政府绩效评估影响动态的总水平的支持执政党和反对党在一个主要的成熟的民主国家，英国。 研究的第二个方面涉及对政党支持的个人层面动态进行建模。 在这里，主要的重点是收集大N，多波面板数据需要解决长期存在的争议，关于个人层面的动态党派附件。 尽管这些争议对于理解新老民主国家政党支持的性质具有重大的理论意义，但由于缺乏足够大的多波小组，关于党派依恋的适当衡量的争议，以及缺乏合适的统计工具来分析党派之争的名义尺度措施的潜在动态。 这样的工具现在是可用的，研究收集必要的大N面板数据需要分析个人层面的潜在变量动态的党派附件测量使用传统的英国选举研究（BES）党识别问题序列和替代党的支持者电池。进行研究所需的总体水平的时间序列和个人水平的面板数据收集在48个连续的英国选民每月调查。 调查由英国首屈一指的互联网调查公司YouGov进行。 每个月的调查都是在全国范围内对1，000名18岁或18岁以上的人进行抽样调查，总共产生了48，000个病例。 多波国家小组，包括一个N约为5 000个病例的四波小组，将被纳入调查。 大规模的横截面和小组调查有利于理论上有趣的分组分析。 总的时间序列分析将通知最近的工作，由主要研究者和同事对竞争对手的分数误差校正模型的规格和测试。 研究中收集的个体和总体数据将每年存入ICPSR数据档案，也可从项目网站下载。该网站还将提供每月“数据摄像机”更新的时间序列变量的演变。 项目研究结果将在主要学术会议上介绍，论文和技术报告可从网站下载。

This research project advances knowledge of the dynamics and determinants of party support in democratic polities. One aspect of the research concerns dynamic relationships between public service delivery and aggregate party support. Acutely aware of the importance of these relationships, governing parties of varying ideological hues have made repeated attempts not only to bolster the supply of public services, but also to curb the electorate's demand for them. The latter efforts have met with relatively little success. Many voters remain convinced that government can, and should, be heavily involved in fields such as education, health, welfare, and transportation, that privatization schemes often go awry, and that government is responsible when public services go badly or are not delivered at all. To date, however, research on factors affecting the aggregate dynamics of party support has focused heavily, indeed almost exclusively, on the impact of economic conditions and various "one-off" political events. By restricting attention to economic conditions and salient events, existing studies have ignored the consequences of public reactions to government performance in a wide variety of highly salient policy areas such as health care, education, and national security. Building on the results of earlier research on the determinants of party support conducted by the principal investigator and colleagues, the study will specifies and tests rival models of how government performance evaluations in several important policy areas affect the dynamics of aggregate-level support for governing and opposition parties in a major mature democracy, Great Britain. A second aspect of the research concerns modeling the individual-level dynamics of party support. Here, the principal focus is gathering the large-N, multi-wave panel data needed to address longstanding controversies regarding the individual-level dynamics of partisan attachments. Although these controversies have major theoretical implications for understanding the nature of party support in democracies new and old alike, their resolution has been hindered by the lack of sufficiently large multi-wave panels, disputes regarding the proper measurement of partisan attachments, and the absence of suitable statistical tools for analyzing the latent-level dynamics of nominal-scale measures of partisanship. Such tools are now available, and the research gathers the requisite large N panel data needed to analyze individual-level latent variable dynamics of partisan attachments measured using both the traditional British Election Study (BES) party identification question sequence and an alternative party supporter battery. The aggregate-level time series and individual-level panel data needed to conduct the research are gathered in 48 consecutive monthly surveys of the British electorate. Surveys are be conducted by YouGov, Britain's premier internet survey firm. Each monthly survey is conducted with a national sample of 1,000 persons 18 years of age or older, yielding a total N of 48,000 cases. Multi-wave national panels, including a four-wave panel with an N of approximately 5,000 cases will be embedded in the surveys. The large size of the cross-sectional and panel surveys facilitate theoretically interesting sub-group analyses. Aggregate time series analyses will be informed by recent work by the principal investigator and colleagues on the specification and testing of rival fractional error correction models. Individual- and aggregate-level data gathered in the study will be deposited annually with the ICPSR Data Archive, and also will be available for downloading from the project website. The website also will provide monthly "DataCam" updates of the evolution of time series variables. Project findings will be presented at major scholarly conferences, and papers and technical reports will be available for downloading from the website.