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Valence as Macro-Competence: An Analysis of Mood in Party Competence Evaluations in Great Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2011

Jane Green  and
Will Jennings
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Abstract

There is a discernable mood in macro-level public evaluations of party issue competence. This paper argues that voters use heuristics to transfer issue competence ratings of parties between issues, therefore issue competence ratings move in common. Events, economic shocks and the costs of governing reinforce these shared dynamics. These expectations are analysed using issue competence data in Britain 1950–2008, and using Stimson's dyad ratios algorithm to estimate ‘macro-competence’. Effects on macro-competence are found for events and economic shocks, time in government, leader ratings, economic evaluations and partisanship, but macro-competence also accounts for unique variance in a model of party choice. The article presents an aggregate-level time-series measure to capture the long-term dynamics of ‘valence’.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , 29 February 2012 , pp. 311 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

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46 Stimson, Public Opinion in America, pp. 60–3; and Appendix 1, pp. 133–7; Stimson et al., ‘Dynamic Representation’, p. 548. The earliest recorded question in Britain on the competence of political parties to handle issues, asked by Gallup about housing in 1945, is included in our dataset for historical purposes, but the estimates of macro-competence for the 1945 to 1949 period are excluded due the absence of other poll observations.

47 Stimson, ‘Public Policy Mood’, p. 10.

48 Note that we do not extend the data to the analysis of the Liberal Democrats in the coalition government, 2010 onwards, and so the estimates relate to the party in opposition, with the short-lived exception of the Lib-Lab pact in 1977.

49 Some wording of some Gallup and Ipsos-MORI questions included ask the public which party has the ‘best policies’ to deal with a particular issue (e.g., ‘Which party has the best policies on … managing the economy?’). To confirm that these questions are capturing evaluations of competence the macro-competence series is also estimated excluding these questions. For the period from 1977 to 2000, during which there was most overlap of question wordings, pairwise correlations of these alternative measures of macro-competence are strong and significant for all the parties – Labour (0.87***), Conservative (0.79***) and Liberals (0.82***) – capturing the same issue competence.

50 This means that the Conservative mood index is estimated from 2,317 observations, the Labour index from 2,345 observations and the Liberal index from 2,106 observations.

51 Stimson, Public Opinion in America, pp. 60–3.

52 For example, a party may naturally be rated positively on similar public service issues, because performance on one may be mirrored on another, but common variation on issues such as crime and healthcare, or defence and education, would be more indicative of evidence of transfer or the use of competence cues.

53 We also compute an extra category, ‘other’. The categories are substantively meaningful but also need to be sufficiently large, over 50 years, to allow for reliable estimation.

54 Bartle et al., ‘The Moving Centre’.

55 Stimson, Public Opinion in America, see online files.

56 We also checked the substantive meaning of the measure to be confident that macro-competence is capturing valence, not positional policy preferences. We calculated the correlation coefficient of macro-competence with a version of macro-competence that excluded MORI's ‘party with the best policies’ survey items, in case these items were tapping policy preferences and exerting a substantively significant effect. This made little difference, with the two measures correlated above 0.80 in a period when the sample consisted equally of items relating to ‘handling’ and ‘best policies’. We also calculated the correlation coefficient of macro-competence with public policy mood (Bartle et al., ‘The Moving Centre’); a comparable measure of respondent's left-right preferences, and found substantively low correlations with macro-competence.

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58 Petrocik, ‘Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections’; Petrocik et al., ‘Issue Ownership and Presidential Campaigning’.

59 See Ostrom and Smith, ‘Error Correction, Attitude Persistence, and Executive Rewards and Punishments’, pp. 131–3.

60 That is: (1 × 0.85 × 0.85 × 0.85 × 0.85 × 0.85).

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62 This indicates that the effect of an intervention is permanent after time tj, so EVENTj = 0 if t < tj; EVENTj = 1 if t ≥ tj.

63 Note that the same inferences are drawn if the second lag of macro-competence is not included, but the diagnostic tests indicate the presence of serial autocorrelation.

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67 Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections.

68 There are 865 survey items for Labour (Gallup 1946–2000, N = 539; Ipsos-MORI 1979–2008, N = 326), 846 items for the Conservatives (Gallup 1951–2000, N = 530; Ipsos-MORI 1979–2008, N = 326) and 805 items for the Liberals (Gallup 1957–2000, N = 413; Ipsos-MORI 1979–2008, N = 392).

69 Bartle et al., ‘The Moving Centre’.

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74 E.g., Clarke and Stewart, ‘Economic Evaluations, Prime Ministerial Approval and Governing Party Support’, pp. 145–70; Clarke, Harold D.., Stewart, Marianne C. and Whiteley, Paul F., ‘New Models for New Labour: The Political Economy of Labour Party Support, January 1992–April, 1997’, American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), 559–575CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clarke et al., ‘Major's Lesser (Not Minor) Effects’. All the ECM models presented in this article were also estimated using the Engle–Granger two-step method which produced similar, if not identical, results. The direction and significance of coefficients were also consistent in models of fractional cointegration estimated using the three-step method (see Clarke and Lebo, ‘Fractional (Co)integration and Governing Party Support in Britain’; Lebo and Norpoth, ‘The PM and the Pendulum’; Lebo and Young, ‘The Comparative Dynamics of Party Support in Great Britain’). Although the effects of error-correction and macro-competence were stronger in the fractional cointegration framework, this also introduced serial autocorrelation into the models. We present the single equation ECMs because our analyses are focused on short-run and long-run effects. Also, the knife-edge problems of tests for stationarity are more severe when dealing with quarterly data, subject to greater persistence than underlying disaggregated data (see Marco Lippi and Lucrezia Reichlin, ‘Trend-Cycle Decompositions and Measures of Persistence: Does Time Aggregation Matter?’ Economic Journal, 101 (1991), 314–23). Over-differencing can introduce a moving average into the estimates but such an approach is not problematic if appropriate diagnostic tests are completed (see Plosser, Charles I. and William, G. Schwert, ‘Estimation of a Non-Invertible Moving Average Process: The Case of Overdifferencing’, Journal of Econometrics, 6 (1977), 199–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar). The diagnostics and robustness checks conducted indicate that use of the single equation method does not present a threat to inference.

75 The Durbin–Watson d-statistic for each of the models does not indicate the presence of serial autocorrelation, with the value approaching 2 in each case. Further, the Breusch–Godfrey test for serial autocorrelation and Engle's Lagrange multiplier test for the presence of autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity also generates acceptable values, insignificant at the 95 per cent confidence level.

76 Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections.

77 We use overlapping measures of satisfaction with the performance of government. For example, Gallup used to ask, ‘Do you approve or disapprove of the Government's record to date?’, while Ipsos-MORI ask, ‘Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way the Government is running the country?’ There are 1,288 survey items concerning government approval (Gallup 1946–2000, N = 519; Ipsos-MORI 1979–2008, N = 332; National Opinion Polls 1962–1991, N = 366; YouGov 2003–2008, N = 71). Note that government approval is not included in the models in Tables 6 and 8, due to overlapping meaning with time in government and the government/opposition dummy. We provide correlations with government approval for substantive interpretation of the correlations.

78 Note that again the Durbin–Watson d-statistic and Breusch–Godfrey test for serial autocorrelation and tests for heteroscedasticity all generate acceptable values.

79 Lebo and Young, ‘The Comparative Dynamics of Party Support in Great Britain’.

80 Sanders et al., ‘Government Popularity and the Falklands War’; Sanders, ‘Economic Performance, Management Competence and the Outcome of the Next General Election’; Sanders, ‘Conservative Incompetence, Labour Responsibility and the Feelgood Factor’.

81 Through further robustness checks it is possible to determine the explanatory power of macro-competence relative to other variables. When macro-competence is dropped from the model of party support a decrease of 5 per cent in the proportion of variance explained (the adjusted R 2) results. The corresponding decrease in the proportion of variance explained is equal to around 2 per cent when macro-partisanship is dropped, 10 per cent when personal economic expectations and its interaction and constituent terms are dropped, and a 15 per cent drop when leader evaluations and lagged party support are dropped. While macro-competence does not account for as much variance as some other variables, it explains a significant proportion.

82 Stimson, Public Opinion in America.

83 Norpoth, Helmut and Buchanan, Bruce, ‘Wanted: The Education President: Issue Trespassing by Political Candidates’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 56 (1992), 87–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simon, ‘The Winning Message’; Sigelman and Buell, ‘Avoidance or Engagement?’; Sides, ‘The Origins of Campaign Agendas’.