The importance of Economic Issues in Politics: A cross-country analysis
Alexey Zakharov presented a report at the HSE/NES seminar on political economy
A joint HSE-NES seminar on political economy took place at HSE on October, 9. Alexey Zakharov, a senior research fellow at LCSR, presented the results of his research on factors of ideological dynamics of political discourse.
People become less concerned with materialist values (emphasizing economic and physical security) and more and more interested in such issues as personal liberty and human rights – what we might label as a post-materialist values - in a number of countries over time. This process is well documented in sociological literature. Does it entail a shift in the emphasis of political debate from economic to non-economic topics? Is this shift driven by economic development?
To answer those questions the two goals were set in the research presented. First, Alexey intended to quantify the positions of political parties in a sample of countries and, second, reveal which factors affect the importance of economic versus non-economic issues in the political debates.
To evaluate ideological positions of political parties the CMP (Comparative Manifesto Project) data were used. Contents of party policy manifestos for a number of countries over a wide period of time was collected and grouped into a set of 57 issues within the project. The issues were then divided into three major groups, dealing with economic, “non-economic” and neutral content.
Then Alexey ran regression analysis in order to identify factors which affected the focus of political discourse on economic and non-economic issues. Dependent variable was evaluated as the average salience of ideological dimension (economic vs. non-economic) for a country in a given period of time, weighted by the vote share of each party in that period. The analysis was based on the data about 41 countries from 1950 to 2010.
In the search for significant independent variables the explanatory power of such measures as interpersonal trust, income, inflation, political regime characteristics (democratic versus authoritarian), population, type of political (presidential or non-presidential) and electoral (majoritatian or non-majoritarian) systems, and measures of ethnic and linguistic fractionalization were tested.
One of the main interesting finidings of the study was the revealed compound effect of interpersonal trust. For countries with higher level of trust an increase in income on average resulted in decrease in the economic dimension salience and increase in non-economic one. On the contrary, for countries with low trust level the same change in income was associated with the fall in non-economic salience, and might even lead to the rise in economic salience.
To clarify possible impact of economic conditions on current political rhetoric effects of high inflation and low growth were explored. It was found out that high inflation tended to increase the concern with economic issues, while neither low-growth nor high-inflation episodes had a significant effect on the salience of non-economic problems.
It was also rather intuitive that there should be a contagion effect in the distribution of salience among neighboring countries. It was shown that while both linguistic and border distances between countries implied equalizing in the level of concern with economic issues, none of them influenced salience of non-economic issues in political debates.
by Vladimir Korshakov