Economics, Politics and the Pursuit of Exogeneity: Why Pattie, Johnston and Sanders are Wrong
| Author | Geoffrey Evans |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00239 |
| Date | 01 December 1999 |
| Published date | 01 December 1999 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Economics, Politics and the Pursuit of
Exogeneity: Why Pattie, Johnston
and Sanders are Wrong
GEOFFREY EVANS
Nueld College, Oxford
Introduction
In my recent piece in this journal on `Economics and voting revisited'I claimed
that the decline in Conservative support following the 1992 General Election
can be understood not in terms of economic performance but as a response to a
party image badly tarnished by political events. I also made the following
observation:
[P]rediction is not explanation: claims concerning the causal impact of party
images can be criticized on the basis that the relation between images and
voting intention is not causal; that images are instead merely the fellow-
travellers of changing vote preferences and, therefore, that the use of party
image measures to explain party support is tautological. Yet without any
other obvious candidates to account for vote switching and with a very
salient set of exogenous political events occurring during the period under
consideration which themselves make changes in party image both likely
and a reasonable basis for re-evaluating party preference, it is hard to see on
what grounds other accounts might be preferred.1
In their welcome comment on my paper,2 Pattie, Johnston and Sanders
(henceforth PJS) reiterate the position advanced in the ®rst sentence quoted
above and try to make a case for preferring another account to which they have
a long-standing commitment: that electoral change in Britain in this period can
be understood as a consequence of economic performance. In this reply I will
argue that PJS provide no convincing case for preferring their account to the
one I proposed, but they do at least provide a useful opportunity for me to
elaborate on what is involved in making causal interpretations on the basis of
survey analysis. These observations can in turn be used to throw doubt on the
validity of economic accounts of party preference in 1990s Britain.
This reply is structured in two sections: the ®rst deals with some of PJS's
misconstruals of the content of my paper and some misconceptions about
inference; the second addresses the key question of identifying exogeneity and
1 G. Evans, `Economics and politics revisited: exploring the decline in Conservative support,
1992±1995', Political Studies, 47 (1999), 151.
2 C. Pattie, R. Johnston and D. Sanders, `On babies and bathwater: a comment on Evans'
``Economics and politics revisited'' ', Political Studies, 47 (1999), 918±932 (hereafter PJS).
# Political Studies Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
934
Debate
tautology. In the conclusion I point to some of the relevant issues that arise
from this debate.
Clearing up Confusion and Clarifying Converse
In part, as is often the case with debates of this sort, PJS are talking about a
dierent issue: my paper attempted to account for the decline in Conservative
support between 1992 and 1995. It focused explicitly on defections from
Conservative support during that period. It did not consider increases in
support after that date, or other sorts of vote switching. The period from 1995
to 1997 might well be characterized by a rather dierent voting decision calculus
than the period after the 1992 election. Despite protestations to the contrary,
PJS assert as much when referring to the impact of the 1992 ERM crisis in their
introduction. Any dierences in the empirical analyses presented in the two
papers are likely to result from the dierent period and questions addressed.
None the less, PJS's critique raises some interesting questions of detail that
should be clari®ed. Not least to point out the errors made by PJS.
First, unlike PJS I did not claim that the failure of growing dissatisfaction
with the economy to explain the...
To continue reading
Request your trial