Professor Catherine de Vries Awarded OUP John Fell Fund Grant
Congratulations to Catherine de Vries, who has been awarded a grant from Oxford Universitys John Fell OUP Research Fund.
The funding will support a project Catherine is jointly undertaking with Sara B. Hobolt and Hector Solaz, Throwing The Rascals Out? Experimental Approaches to the Study of Electoral Punishment.
She writes, In the midst of the economic crisis sweeping across Europe today, austerity dominates the political agenda. The bleak financial and economic prospects encourage governments of all political stripes to implement major reforms. Against this backdrop, it is of uttermost importance to study voter responses to changes in public policy and spending. This project informs politicians and policy experts about the electoral ramifications of policies and reforms. Insights from political science and economics suggest that as economic conditions deteriorate and austerity measures affect households, voters are likely to vote for opposition parties and throw the rascals out. This model is also at heart of theories of representative democracy where elections function as a sanctioning mechanism. Yet, empirically we often observe deviations from this model, and find that many governments are re-elected despite dire economic conditions. This project aims to address this puzzle. We maintain that current work has not gone far enough in constructing realistic choice models that incorporate insights from psychology and economics about human decision making under risk. We start from the assumption that there should be little difference between political decision-making and in other parts of life such as consumer or work behaviour. Therefore electoral behaviour is expected to be bounded rational. We develop and test a model of electoral punishment that models vote utilities as a function of both incumbents and alternatives characteristics as well as the number of choice options available. Our main modes of inference are laboratory and online survey experiments in the United Kingdom.
The project will run from 15 April 2013 until 14 April 2015.
