Has the Great Recession Weakened Partisanship and Government Accountability in the Advanced Democracies?

Parties and partisanship provide the most efficient structures to legitimise representatives and hold them accountable in democracies. They connect citizen demands with elected representatives. However, the state of the economy and economic perceptions can interfere with this connection. If partisanship represents a running tally of past performance evaluations as Fiorina (1981) suggests, then a poor performance on the key valence issue of the economy is likely to weaken partisanship over time. This in turn has the potential to weaken political accountability if parties are no longer seen as effective vehicles for holding government to account. This interpretation of partisanship is in sharp contrast with the traditional ‘Michigan’ model which sees partisanship as being an enduring product of socialisation processes in the family and the community in early adulthood (Campbell et al. 1960). In this interpretation partisanship should be largely untouched by economic performance. On the other hand when it comes to explaining voting behaviour contemporaneous economic evaluations may have strengthened as predictors of vote choice, even as partisanship has weakened. If so accountability will remain effective but it will operate via valence judgements on issues rather than through party loyalties. To evaluate the relationship between valence performance, partisanship and voting behaviour this paper focuses on a single economic event with high impact: the Great Recession of 2007-10. It poses the question: To what extent has the economic crisis affected partisanship, issue perceptions and party accountability in the European democracies? We study these relationships over the course of ten years (2002-2012) using the Cumulative file of the European Social Survey. In effect, the Great Recession of 2007-10 acts as a treatment in a quasi-experimental research design. In this way the effects of the recession on party attachments and issue perceptions will be evaluated across Europe using a multi-level modelling procedure.