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Duke University Dissertation Template The Electoral Politics of Vulnerability and the Incentives to Cast an Economic Vote by Matthew McMinn Singer Department of Political Science Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Karen Remmer, Supervisor ___________________________ Herbert Kitschelt ___________________________ Guillermo Trejo ___________________________ John Aldrich Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2007 ABSTRACT The Electoral Politics of Vulnerability and the Incentives to Cast an Economic Vote by Matthew McMinn Singer Department of Political Science Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Karen Remmer, Supervisor ___________________________ Herbert Kitschelt ___________________________ Guillermo Trejo ___________________________ John Aldrich An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2007 Copyright by Matthew McMinn Singer 2007 Abstract The relationship between economic performance and support for the incumbent government varies across voters and electoral contexts. While some of this variation can be explained by factors that make it easier or harder to hold politicians accountable, an additional explanation is that the electoral importance of economic issues varies systematically across groups and contexts. Because issues that are personally important tend to be more easily accessible when voting, we prose that exposure to economic shocks generates higher incentives to place more weight on economic conditions when voting. We test this hypothesis using archived and original survey data from Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. The analysis demonstrates that economic vulnerability enhances the economy’s salience. Specifically, poverty generates incentives to cast an egotropic vote while wealth, insecure employment, informal employment, and exclusion from governments welfare programs enhances sociotropic voting because these groups have greater stakes in the national economy. By implication, elections in developing countries with large numbers of vulnerable voters should be more strongly contested over economics despite the weak institutional environment that potentially undermines the ability of voters to hold politicians accountable. Aggregate elections returns and the CSES survey support this proposition and demonstrate that economic voting is iv substantially more common in Latin American than in Western Europe or North America. Thus variations in economic voting provide opportunities to not only learn about the conditions under which elections can serve as mechanisms of accountability but also a laboratory to model the process of preference formation and the demands voters place on their representatives. v Acknowledgements This project began with two papers written, it feels, a long time ago. Its immediate start was a paper I wrote on cross-national variations in economic voting in Europe that Karen Remmer let me do for her seminar and elections and markets in Latin America. I promised her I would get back to the course’s topic eventually; I now consider that deal fulfilled. The other start was my experience working with the KBYU exit poll and its then directors Kelly Patterson and David Magleby on questionnaire design and data analysis. While my paper on voter differences in issue concerns has echoes in this analysis, the experience of exploring public opinion data and getting my hands dirty with its generation and analysis is what can be blamed for me choosing this career path and is thus somehow responsible for this project’s generation. Dan Nielson and Kirk Hawkins also deserve thanks for convincing me to keep my interest in Latin America. While at Duke, I have benefited from having great advisors who seem to agree about very little. Karen Remmer was a great mentor, providing advice, constant constructive criticism of my ideas and writing, access to her web of contacts and friends, financial support, and the freedom to work on my own projects on her research account’s time. Thanks for recognizing that even when I was working on other research projects that I would eventually return to this one. Herbert Kitschelt has always pushed iv me to reach for the big questions and then been patient when I preferred to provide increasingly specific answers to smaller ones. I have also benefited from his constant inclusion of me in his various conferences over the years that have provided experience, contacts, and great food. John Aldrich’s feedback was always helpful, even when it resulted in me finding articles he had written on parts of my dissertation question two decades ago. Guillermo Trejo had been a constant sounding board on poverty, welfare, and politics in Mexico as well as someone who always sees the positive in my work. Many other faculty members at Duke, UNC, and BYU have provided great instruction, examples, friendship, and food over the years and I look forward to at least paying for meals soon. This project could not have been completed without various groups providing financial assistance to fund fieldwork and the inclusion of questions on various surveys in 2005-2006. I am especially grateful to the Ford Foundation and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center for the Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship in the Areas of Democratic Governance and Human Welfare in South America, which funded the fieldwork in 2006. Preliminary fieldwork in Argentina in 2005 was made possible with funding from the Walter Milano Endowment, and the Duke University Graduate School, and the Department of Political Science at Duke University. Finally, I am grateful to the Duke University Graduate School for the Bass Instructorship that allowed me to be in residence in Durham while finishing writing. v While in the field, I have also had the good fortune to have many people help me gain access to their surveys. I especially thank Carlos Fara, Manuel Mora y Araujo, Luciana Grandi, Maria Jose Gentili, Santaigo Lacase, Nicolas Solari, Sergio Berensztein, David Sulmont, Fernando Tuesta, Luis Benavente, Ulises Beltran, Federico Estevez, Alejandro Moreno, and Raul Jorrat for their help (and generosity) in compiling the necessary data within my budget constraints, for their comments on the project, and for the good company as we discussed public opinion dynamics in these countries. APOYO Opinión y Mercado S.A. (now part of IPSOS) also generously provided me access to their archived survey reports, which allowed me to add observations to data I had compiled from the Library at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos in compiling the presidential approval series analyzed in Chapter 5. While in the field, I also had more opportunities than I deserved to pick the minds of scholars from many disciplines. Special thanks need to be given to Cynthia Pok and Jorge Paz for their insights on the Argentine informal sector, Federico Estevez for our discussions on welfare politics in Mexico, and Martin Tanaka for insights on electoral dynamics in Peru. These various interactions were greatly facilitated by the Universidad Torcuato di Tella, the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, and Senator Rodríguez Prats providing me with affiliations, office space, and access to computers, phones, libraries, and good company. I especially thank the staff at these various places for taking care of me and going the extra mile to make my stay comfortable and vi productive. Finally, my fieldwork experience was greatly enhanced by Sergio Berensztein and Emily Stern (and Zoe and Sam) letting us have their house in Argentina and Marco Fernandez and family letting me use their home in Mexico- I fear I will never get to have such luxuries when traveling ever again. I am also grateful to the library staff at Duke for arranging access to the Latinobarometer, LAPOP, and Roper collections. Thanks also to those organizations for allowing access to the data even for much of it to be archived at Duke. The quality of the final project has been greatly enhanced not only by the comments from my committee but from multiple readings by good friends. Special thanks are given to Kevin Morrison, Dan Kselman, Philipp Rehm, Seth Jolly, Jorge Bravo, and Sinziana Popa; the reader may be able to tell which chapters were vetted by friends and which ones did not have that benefit. I have also been able to present portions of this research at the Graduate Colloquium, APSA and Midwest Political Science meetings, the University of Iowa, BYU, the University of Connecticut, and CIDE and am grateful for the comments that I received. Any remaining errors and my weak writing remain my responsibility despite the best efforts of these groups. I have been lucky to have great parents. My parents provided the confidence that I could achieve whatever I wanted to as well as the necessary support and encouragement to reach my goals. Their support of my trip to Mexico in elementary school started my fascination with the region and their support of my missionary service vii in Mexico from 1996-1998 compltede it. I am grateful for their continued support and willingness to jet around the hemisphere to visit their grandkids wherever I drag them to. My in-laws have been generous with their space and affection, allowing me to take over the basement computer to work every time I am in town and to let me drag their daughter to far off states and countries. Finally, this project could not have been possible without the support of my wife and children. Cara accepted me despite knowing (or maybe not knowing) that meant 6 years of poverty while in graduate school, me never taking vacations because there was always a paper to be working on, me taking off for weeks at a time for fieldwork, and complete uncertainty about where we would end up. Through it all she has always been patient and supportive, has managed life craziness, and has been the best friend that I could have ever hoped for.
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