The Compleat German Economic Voter: New Pathways in Patrimonial and Positional Economic Voting

Abstract

Recent studies of economic voting suggest that beyond the traditional valence conception of voters rewarding or punishing incumbent administrations for economic performance, there are patrimonial (assets) and positional (economic policy) dimensions to the economic vote too. To date, investigations of economic voting in Germany have primarily concentrated on the valence model. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 4 component included in the 2013 German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), our paper examines the multifaceted nature of economic voting in Germany. Our analysis reveals there are patrimonial and positional economic dimensions to the vote in Germany, implying that the compleat economic voter is also a German phenomenon. Beyond contributing to studies of German voting behaviour, our paper breaks new ground by unpacking individual heterogeneity associated with patrimonial and positional economic voting. We demonstrate political sophistication moderates to some extent the prevalence of asset motivated and economic policy voting. Patrimonial voting is somewhat more likely among the less politically sophisticated, while positional economic voting is somewhat more probable among highly sophisticated citizens. Our study confirms the multidimensionality of economic voting and also highlights the conditionality of patrimonial and positional economic voting is an individual level phenomenon.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank the Centre for Political Research, KU Leuven for inviting Stephen Quinlan for a research visit in autumn 2019. We are indebted to Deirdre Tinney for helpful comments concerning the paper and we also thank Bernd Butsch. We appreciate the feedback of anonymous reviewers. As ever all errors are ours.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALS

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2020.1750006.

Notes

1 For a somewhat alternative perspective see Anderson and Hecht (2012) who argue that reward-punishment economic voting in the 2009 German election depended on voters who personally suffered from the Global Financial Crisis, thus implying an egocentric motivation that is context dependent.

2 Conventionally the dependent variable for valence economic voting studies is the vote for the incumbent government. For positional economic and patrimonial voting, it is the ideological position of the party, which is often not in sync with the governing status of parties in a particular election. Given that the 2013 German election had an outgoing right-wing coalition (CDU, CSU, and FDP), testing these dimensions simultaneously is straightforward.

3 Although for counter opinions, see Nannestad and Paldam 1997; Anderson and Hecht, 2012.

4 The sample was Conducted by MARPLAN Media-und-Sozialforschungsgesellschaft with fieldwork running for a total of 92 days beginning one day after the Federal election of September 21, 2013.

5 A minimum of four attempts was made to contact a potential respondent before declaring it a non-contact.

6 For robustness, we reclassified our patrimony index to include the savings measure and re-estimate all of our models. We find that under this specification, patrimony retains significance when controlling for other socio-demographic correlates (see Appendix Table C3, column I). However it does not reach conventional statistical significance (see Appendix Table C3, column II, p=0.108) when the valence economic and positional economic measures are added to the model. Nonetheless, the inclusion of savings in the patrimony index concerning its interaction with political sophistication does not alter the overall findings (see Appendix Table C, column III).

7 Our main models do not include a control for partisanship with rightist parties because ideology and partisanship controls in the one model in certain circumstances is unwise as they are capturing somewhat similar dynamics (Kritzinger et al., 2013). Additionally, we include controls for religious identification as a Christian, which in part is capturing the cleavage dynamics in German politics. Moreover, partisan identification with the rightist parties in the sample is relatively small (21 per cent). Consequently, our controls for religious identification and ideological self-placement provide for more stringent controls. Nonetheless, we re-estimate our final models with a control for respondents who report having strong partisanship with a rightist party instead of respondent ideology (see Appendix Tables C1–2). Under this specification, we find that our results for the most hold, although the interaction between political sophistication and patrimony fails to reach conventional levels of statistical significance (p=0.052).

8 We also investigated whether positional economic voting was more prevalent in West Germany compared to East Germany. We found no evidence of any statistically significant difference (see appendix Table C4).

9 The y-axis represents the predicted probability of voting for the centre-right in the 2013 German Federal election. The x-axis details the extent of patrimony. The coloured lines represent the varying levels of political sophistication while the shapes indicate the predicted probability of voting for the centre-right and the vertical lines around these shapes represent the 95 per cent confidence intervals. Figure 4 also has the same format but for this figure The x-axis details attitudes towards income redistribution.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Okolikj

Martin Okolikj PhD is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Political Research at KU Leuven, Belgium working on the 2019 Belgian Election Study. His research interests are comparative electoral behavior, political economy, and political methodology. His work has appeared in journals such as The European Journal of Political Research, European Political Science Review, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties, among others.

Stephen Quinlan

Stephen Quinlan PhD is Senior Researcher at the GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim and Project Manager of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project. His research interests are comparative electoral behavior and social media's impact on politics. His work has appeared in journals including Perspectives on Politics, Electoral Studies, European Political Science Review, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties and, Information, and Communication, and Society.