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

比较政治行为研究中的一个重要难题是，经济影响对政党和政客政治支持的程度和性质在不同国家和时间上存在明显的差异。在这项提案中，首席调查人员为这一难题提供了一个理论上的解决方案，并勾勒出了一个经验性检验的计划。理论解决方案不同于以前关于比较经济投票的工作，因为它在很大程度上借鉴了对信息对舆论的性质、来源和影响的相对较新的见解(Zaller 1992,2001；Mutz 1998；Lupia and McCubins 1998；Iyengar 1991；Page and Shapiro 1992；Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996)。这类作品与早期文学作品有两个不同之处。首先，它赋予媒体在向公民传达信息并最终影响他们的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(即他们的政治意识)的差异来解释个人在政治观点和行为上的异质性。然而，这篇文献的大部分见解还没有深入到经济投票的比较研究中，对导致经济投票经验现象的认知过程保持着相当简单的概念。这或许就是为什么对经济投票中跨国差异的主要解释--“责任明确性”假说--仅取得了有限的实证成功。在这个项目中，首席调查者提供了一个更微妙的经济投票理论模型，该模型建立在美国公众舆论最近的文献(这本身就是认知心理学进步的产物)的基础上。首席调查员从通常的经济投票模式开始，但认识到它实际上是建立在一系列相关意见的基础上(即经济判断、对经济的责任归属和政治支持的表达)。因此，构建一个更充分实现经济投票模式的有效方法，将是充实对选民如何形成和改变每一种观点的解释。幸运的是，上面提到的民意文献为构建这些民意模型提供了一个一般的理论框架。经济投票模型的这种理论扩展适应了文献中已有的一些关于比较经济投票的最突出但更特别的假设，但它也产生了一系列新的理论假设。事实上，这一理论有望重新引导比较经济投票的学生，不再把政府机构和政党制度作为跨国经济投票差异的根源，而是专注于媒体报道经济的方式的国际差异。此外，该理论还产生了经济投票中个体水平异质性的一些新来源(因为这些特征在不同人群中的分布不同)，这也可以帮助解释跨国经济投票的差异。为了探索这种理论扩展是否有用，首席调查员将需要收集关于不同国家的媒体随着时间的推移对经济的看法的数据。为此，首席调查员将收集来自15个发达民主国家的选定报纸在1980-2001年间的约30,000个头版。这些文件将由母语人士复制和编码，以传达经济(和一些政治)信息。该项目还将需要个人一级的信息。许多假设具体说明了政治意识和经济判断、政治支持或责任归因等变量之间的关系。为了测试这些问题，首席调查员需要向不同国家的公民提出一系列调查问题。首席调查员将通过在每个国家进行的盖洛普调查中包括相对较短的相关项目来实现这一点。

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.