Identifying the economic determinants of individual voting behaviour in UK general elections

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

January 15, 2024

Summary:

We explore the economic determinants of individual voting behaviour in five UK electoral cycles during 1992–2014. Using the Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Surveys, we investigate the importance of political sentiments and subjective economic evaluations disentangling persistence of party support and unobserved heterogeneity effects. We estimate joint dynamic tripartite models of party support and egocentric perceptions of current and prospective finances, permitting longitudinal simultaneous determination of perceptions of personal finances and political preferences. The results validate the economic voting hypothesis in cycles adjacent to economic downturns: support for the governing political party is positively related to individual perceptions of own financial well-being. Failing to account for simultaneity and not accounting for dynamics and initial political party support inflate the impact of personal financial evaluations.

Published in

Oxford Economic Papers

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 76 , p.267 -289

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/oep/gpad003

ISSN

307653

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

© Oxford University Press 2023.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


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