Oxford Logo Raymond Duch
  Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.


Raymond Duch is Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Here is a short biography and Curriculum Vitae.

The Economic Vote: How Political and Economic Institutions Condition Election Results

Economic Vote

This book proposes a selection model for explaining cross-national variation in economic voting: Rational voters condition their economic vote on whether incumbents are responsible for economic outcomes because this is the optimal way to identify and elect competent economic managers under conditions of uncertainty. This model explores how political and economic institutions alter the quality of the signal that the previous economy provides about the competence of candidates. The rational economic voter is also attentive to strategic cues regarding the responsibility of parties for economic outcomes and their electoral competitiveness. Theoretical propositions are derived linking variation in economic and political institutions to variability in economic voting. The authors demonstrate that there is economic voting, and that it varies significantly across political contexts, and then test explanations for this variation derived from their theory. The data consist of 165 election studies conducted in 19 different countries over a 20-year time period.

The book can be purchased at

For more information please visit www.raymondduch.com/economicvoting

Comparative CCAP (Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project )


The Strategic Ideological Vote: Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Il. April 3-6, 2008


Teaching

Hilary Term 2013

Hilary Term 2012

Michaelmas Term 2011

Trinity Term 2011

Hilary Term 2011

Trinity Term 2010

Hilary Term 2010

Hilary Term 2009

Hilary Term 2008

Trinity Term 2008

Hillary Term 2007

 

Recent Presentations

Working Papers

    Abstract -This essay reports the results for an ongoing set of experiments designed to help understand individual preferences for redistributive policies, specifically taxation.One of the central conjectures is that there exists a taxation norm that is relatively homogeneous within populations and across countries. This tax norm represents what individuals accept as an appropriate rate at which income should be taxed. We attempt to identify this tax norm by administering tax compliance experiments in which individuals are assigned to different tax rate treatments. The results for these rst set of experiments suggests that our initial conjecture regarding a tax norm of approximately 20 to 30 percent is plausible although the notion that it might be homogenous within and across populations is less tenable. Hence one of our primary interests is understanding what factors might drive individuals to prefer rates of taxation that are higher (or lower) than this tax norm. This first set of experiments included a number of features that provide prelimi-nary insights into variation associated with both context and type. With respect to context, we have some preliminary evidence that high wage earners are more willing to pay higher taxes when there exists higher levels of income inequality. Reducing inequality may be a public good for the rich. We are exploring this contextual effect in more depth as part of a cross-national extension of this project. Our tax compliance experiments also included a set of experiments and post-experiment survey questions that provide some insight into how these redistribution preferences vary across types of individuals in the population. Subjects also played a standard Dictator Game and we find that subjects who are other-regarding when they play the Dictator Game are more likely to report income when audit rates are low. Nevertheless, we continue to see evidence of our tax norm within low and high other-regarding types: In the case of both groups we see a significant drop in tax compliance as tax rates move from 20% to 30%.

Publications and Current Manuscripts

  • Voter Perceptions of Agenda Power and Attribution of Responsibility for Economic Performance

    Abstract - In two recent experiments (one in the lab and one over the internet) concerning collective decision making we determined that individuals mainly assign responsibility to the decision maker with agenda power and with the largest vote share (Duch, Przepiorka and Stevenson 2012). We found rather weak evidence that responsibility is assigned to decision makers with veto power or allocated proportional to weighted voting power. Our conjecture then is that individuals in our online experiment who recognized the importance of proposal power in the embedded experiment will be those more likely to exercise an economic vote for the Conservative PM Party (since they are the agenda setter in the governing coalition) and for the opposition Labour Party. The conjecture is con rmed. Essentially, the data show that economic vot- ing at the individual level is con ned to individuals who understand the value of proposal power. This in turn suggests that the economic vote itself is motivated by a coherent attempt to punish or reward parties that actually deserve it in the speci c sense that they were mostly responsible for choosing the policies that were implemented. Further, the strong reliance on proposal power as the workhorse of this mechanism of accountability, tells us that simple heuristics can do a lot of the work that cold rationality and complex calculation have done in much of the previous discussion of economic voting.

  • Responsibility Attribution for Collective Decision Makers

    Abstract - We assess the micro-foundations of rational theories of vote choice in contexts with multi-party governing coalitions. These theories of coalition-directed voting presume voters can assign responsibility to specific parties in the governing coalition. We conduct a laboratory and an internet survey experiment designed to tease out the heuristics subjects use in their responsibility attribution decisions. The lab experiment comprises a group dictator game with weighted voting power of the dictators and a punishment possibility for the recipients. Our results show that recipients punish unfair allocations and mainly target the decision maker with agenda power and with the largest vote share. We find rather weak evidence that decision makers with veto power are targeted or that recipients engage in punishment proportional to weighted voting power. The survey experiment tests whether subjects indeed believe that the decision maker with agenda power has the most influence on the collective decision outcome. The results confirm this conjecture.

    Online Appendix for: Responsibility Attribution for Collective Decision Makers

  • Coalition Context, Voter Heuristics and the Coalition Directed Vote

    Abstract - In contexts in which the election results in a multi-party governing coalition, the rational voter assesses what parties are likely to coalesce and the policies they are likely to agree on in potential coalition governments. We demonstrate that the heuristics used in this coalition reasoning exhibited by national electorates are ecologically rational. Evidence from experiments and observational survey data collected in Denmark, Germany and the U.K., indicates that voters acquire the heuristics that allow them to anticipate the types of coalitions that form after an election. The range of heuristics voters acquire varies by the complexity of coali- tion formation in each country: We recover ve dimensions of coalition reasoning heuristics using experimental vingettes embedded in British, Danish and German internet surveys: 1) voters understand the basic arithmetic of majority coalition formation (a majority of seats are necessary); 2) voters recognise that formateur status increases a party's likelihood of entering the governing coalition; 3) voters anticipate that parties that are proximate on the ideological scale will more likely agree to a coalition; 4) voters anticipate coalitions will consist of the parties that are ideologically connected; and 5) voters anticipate the formation of minimal winning coalitions. The Danish electorate exhibits more sophisticated coalition heuristics than is the case for the German electorate; and the British electorate has very under-developed coalition reasoning heuristics. There is some evidence that acquir- ing one or more of these heuristics increases the likelihood of exercising an informed coalition directed economic vote.

    Technical Appendix for Coalition Context, Voter Heuristics and the Coalition Directed Vote

Contact Information

 

Raymond Duch * Nuffield College, New Road , University of Oxford , Oxford UK OX1 1NF * Ph: 44 1 865 278 515