How do Room to Manoeuvre Constraints affect Performance Voting? A Comparative Analysis in the EU Members

Since the 1980's, new styles of policy-making have arisen in European societies and have increasingly challenged democratic accountability: modern governance is now characterized by cooperation between different governmental levels (local, sub-national, regional, national and supranational) as well as between public and non-public actors. It describes a horizontal process of cooperation between public actors (such as politicians) and non-public actors, such as interest groups and civil society, in which these actors work together to implement policies. The latter is a vertical hierarchy involving decentralization, and supranational processes of integration and is most commonly known as a multi-level system of governance (Hooghe and Marks 2001). In this new institutional framework, states have experienced a loss of control over a number of policies, and national governments have been increasingly constrained in terms of their leeway in policy choices. Hence, perceptions of national governments' responsibility should decrease and affect voting behaviour accordingly. These new constraints for governments have been empirically translated into a clear decrease in economic-voting in more open economies (Hellwig and Samuels 2007) and in places where multi-level governance is most prominent (Anderson 2005). More precisely, globalisation and federal processes reduce governments' leeway in the economy. In turn, it should be reflected in voters' perceptions of national governments' responsibility: national governments should thus be held less responsible for policies on which they cannot act. Eventually, it will weaken the connection between economic performance and incumbents' successes in national electoral contests. Drawing on Hellwig (2001, 2008, 2014), I expect voters who deem their government to be constrained in the economy to give less weight to economic considerations in their voting calculus. Conversely, they should be more prone to vote on other issues and/or make place for partisan attachments. Empirical findings in economic-voting support this claim: governmental constraints in the economic field reduce the importance assigned to evaluations of economic performance and to party positions on economic issues in Britain and in France (Hellwig, 2008). Furthermore, economic-voting is less important in more open economies (Hellwig and Samuels 2007), while non-economic issues are expanding in the voting-calculus when perceptions of RMC are high (Hellwig 2014). The objective of this paper is to further investigate these findings in a comparative perspective in the EU framework. To analyse performance voting in the National parliamentary elections, I use the EES 2009 dataset and the CED 2014 dataset. They include vote behaviours at the occasion of national parliamentary elections, evaluations of both policy performance and responsibility attributions in 8 policy areas (economy, standards of health care, interest rates, immigration, climate change, taxation, debts and deficits and unemployment) in 28 EU member states. Although not systematic, the data show that national governments' responsibility attributions decrease the national economic vote and increase non-economic issue voting.