AN ECONOMIC EXPLANATION OF THE NATIONALIZATION OF ELECTORAL POLITICS

15
Results
The first piece of evidence supporting the economic-voting explanation of the
nationalization of electoral politics is shown in Figure 1. The coefficient of correlation
between the nationalization scores using Bochsler's measure and the output gap in our
sample of elections is positive (0.12) and statistically significant at the 0.05 level:
positive output gaps increase the nationalization of party systems.
Figure 2: Country-level nationalization and economic performance
.3
.2
D(Nationalization)
.1
.0
-.1
-.2
-.3
-.4
-.2 -.1 .0 .1 .2
Output gap
The results of the regression models are presented in Table 2. The first model
explains about 79 percent of the variance in nationalization scores using Bochsler's
measure. The output gap has the expected positive sign and is statistically significant at
the 0.05 level. When the economy is performing well, nationalization increases. On
average, an increase of 1 per cent in the output gap increases nationalization by 0.142
points. This is not a negligible effect, as the within standard deviation of Nationalization
is substantially smaller (0.06) than the between one (0.11). Interestingly, the coefficient
on the lag of the dependent variable is relatively small: 0.53. This means that there is
substantial variation in nationalization scores across elections. Finally, the age of
democracy does not behave as expected, but is not statistically significant. In model 1A,
nationalization is measured with Kasuya and Moenius’ measure. As can be seen, the
results are qualitatively the same.