Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-04T23:36:05.340Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Economic Outcomes and Political Support for British Governments among Occupational Classes: A Dynamic Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 1982

Douglas A. Hibbs Jr.  and
Nicholas Vasilatos
Douglas A. Hibbs Jr.
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The first section of the article establishes the political salience of macroeconomic issues to the British electorate, reviews the distributional consequences of macroeconomic outcomes, and suggests that unemployment outcomes in particular have strong class-related distributional effects.

The second part presents a dynamic model of how rational voters evaluate the governing party, based on the idea that voters evaluate the cumulative performance of the governing party relative to the prior performance of the current opposition. Since the present relevance of prior outcomes decays over time, voters weight current performance more heavily than past performance informing contemporaneous political judgments.

The empirical analyses in the third section include measures of nominal economic performance (inflation and exchange rate movements) and real economic performance (unemployment and real income fluctuations). The regression results indicate that the responses of political support among the occupational classes to macroeconomic changes are sizeable, and that the cross-class variations are consistent with the distributional consequences reviewed at the beginning of the article.

The concluding section develops the electoral implications of the empirical results and presents a novel interpretation of trends in class-related political support for the parties. The evidence shows that the argument that there has been a persistent decline of class-based political alignments in Britain is erroneous.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 259 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1982

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alt, James E. 1979. The politics of economic decline, economic management and political behavior in Britain since 1964. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Blank, Stephen. 1977. Britain: the politics of foreign economic policy, the domestic economy, and the problem of pluralistic stagnation. International Organization 31:673–721.10.1017/S0020818300018658CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brittain, Samuel. 1969. Steering the economy. London: Seeker and Warburg.Google Scholar
Butler, David and Stokes, Donald. 1974. Political change in Britain, 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's Press.10.1007/978-1-349-02048-5CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crewe, Ivor, Sarlvik, Bo, and Alt, James. 1977. Partisan dealignment in Britain 1964–1974. British Journal of Political Science 7:129–90.10.1017/S0007123400000922CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daniel, William W. 1974. A national survey of the unemployed. London: Political and Economic Planning Broadsheet.Google Scholar
Feldstein, Martin. 1973. The economics of the new unemployment. The Public Interest 33.Google Scholar
Franklin, Mark N., and Mughan, Anthony. 1978. The decline of class voting in Britain: problems of analysis and interpretation. American Political Science Review 72(2):523–34.10.2307/1954108CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frey, Bruno S. and Schneider, Friedrich. 1978. A politico-economic model of the United Kingdom. Economic Journal 88:243–53.10.2307/2232128CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hibbs, Douglas A. 1975. Economic interest and the politics of macroeconomic policy. Monograph. Cambridge, Mass.: Center for International Studies, MIT.Google Scholar
Hibbs, Douglas A. 1977. Trade union power, labor militancy and wage inflation: a comparative analysis. Monograph. Cambridge, Mass.: Center for International Studies, MIT.Google Scholar
Hibbs, Douglas A. with the assistance of Rivers, R. Douglas and Vasilatos, Nicholas. (1982a). On the demand for economic outcomes: macroeconomic performance and mass political support in the United States, Great Britain and Germany. Journal of Politics 05.10.2307/2130595CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hibbs, Douglas A. with the assistance of R. Douglas Rivers and Nicholas Vasilatos (1982b). The dynamics of political support for American presidents among occupational and partisan groups. American Journal of Political Science 05.10.2307/2111042CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hibbs, Douglas A. and Vasilatos, Nicholas. 1981. Macroeconomic performance and mass political support in the United States and Great Britain. In Hibbs, D. A. Jr., and Fassbender, H. (ed.) Contemporary Political Economy. Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar
Kernell, Samuel. 1980. Unemployment, inflation, and party democracy: a study of the strategic bases of economic policy in advanced industrial democracies. Mimeographed. San Diego: University of California.Google Scholar
Kernell, Samuel and Hibbs, Douglas A. Jr. 1981. A critical threshold model of presidential popularity. In Hibbs, D. A. Jr. and Fassbender, H. (ed.), Contemporary political economy. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
MacKay, D. I. and Reid, G. 1972. Redundance, unemployment and manpower policy. Economic Journal 82:1256–72.10.2307/2231305CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muellbauer, J. 1974. Prices and Inequality: The United Kingdom Experience. Economic Journal 84.Google Scholar
Nickell, S. J. and Metcalf, D. 1977. The plain man's guide to the out-of-work. London: London School of Economics.Google Scholar
Piachaud, David. 1978. Inflation and income distribution. In Goldthorpe, J. H. and Hirsch, F. (ed.), The political economy of inflation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pissarides, Christopher. 1980. British government popularity and economic performance. Economic Journal 90: 569–81.10.2307/2231927CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sachs, Jeffrey D. (1979). Wages, profits, and macroeconomic adjustment: a comparative study. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2:269–319.10.2307/2534386CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlozman, Kay L. and Verba, Sidney. 1979. Injury to insult; unemployment, class, and political response. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Strange, Susan. 1971. Sterling and British policy: a study of an international currency in decline. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Whiteley, Paul. 1979. Electoral forecasting from poll data: the British case. British Journal of Political Science 9:219–36.10.1017/S0007123400001733CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zuckerman, Alan S. and Lichbach, M. I. 1977. Stability and change in European electorates. World Politics 29:523–51.10.2307/2010038CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.