The party brand and economic voting
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Economic voting is both a normative prescription of democratic theory and a heuristic that voters use to make inferences about the government. While the model simplifies many of the requirements for accountability, it also strips voters and political parties of ideological preferences and goals. I identified a few instances within the literature on the clarity of responsibility that are inconsistent with the assumptions of the retrospective model of economic voting. These instances suggest that voters are prospectively and ideologically oriented when voting for a party. I offer an alternative explanation for these results based on the ideological brands that parties develop. In sum, I argue that economic voting effect will be stronger when voters can clearly perceive an ideological distinction between the government and the opposition. First, I provide evidence that intra-party cohesion and party behavior affect the uncertainty associated with a party's ideological brand. Next, I introduce the concept of ideological distinctiveness and provide evidence that uncertainty interferes with one of the main functions of ideologies, which is to provide a means to compare and distinguish between party programs. Finally, I argue that uncertainty and ideological distinctiveness between government members and the opposition affect voters' capacity to cast an economic vote. Specifically, I argue that voters dissatisfied with the economy look for an ideological alternative to the government, and when a clear ideological alternative is found in the opposition, economic voting tends to be strong.
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Ph. D.