Atribución de la responsabilidad y voto económico el caso de España

Abstract

Until the appearance of the first wave of studies focusing on the hypothesis of the clarity of responsibility, the theory of economic voting implicitly assumed that the government is held responsible for the economic conditions of the country. Departing from previous studies based upon the hypothesis of the clarity of responsibility, in this article we suppose that rational voters have uncertainty at the time of making the government responsible and they are risk-neutral. Then we build a utility function with two arguments: the sociotropic prospective evaluation of economy and the ideological distance between the voter and the competing political options, among which the voter has to choose. This way, the economic voting decision takes place in two stages: On the one hand, the voter subjectively assigns the responsibility to the government. On the other hand, she decides her voting option as a function of her sociotropic prospective evaluation and her ideological distance. We derive tree main findings from our model estimates and hypothesis testing: (1) it could not be taken for granted the implicit assumption of responsibility attribution in economic voting, (2) there is a subjective probability that the voter makes the government responsible for the economic conditions of the country, which in turn affects her individual voting decision, and it also has an impact over the relative effect of factors that explain electoral behavior, and (3) ideology is an argument of the utility function that we can not deny, as the theory of economic voting has typically done.