Foundation

Conflict is frequently thought to be costly for democratic leaders. Involvement in conflict typically produces casualties, which tend to reduce support for the war effort and decrease the leader's popularity.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, as Bueno de Mesquita and LalmanFootnote ¹² assert, ‘[t]he very need to resort to force suggests a political failure by the national leadership…’. Thus conflict involvement can be characterized as a costly gamble that is likely to erode the domestic political position of democratic leaders. However the provision of public goods to a domestic audience associated with conflict involvement can be expected to enhance the leader's chances of political survival.Footnote ¹³ Indeed, in the cases of the United States and Great Britain, leader popularity has been shown to rise in response to participation in international crises.Footnote ¹⁴ Conflict also affords democratic leaders many other opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable. For example, conflict may facilitate a leader's efforts to outmaneuver the domestic opposition by changing the national agenda.Footnote ¹⁵ Dispute involvement may also divert public attention away from poor economic conditions,Footnote ¹⁶ solidify support for the leader among the ruling coalitionFootnote ¹⁷ or allow the leader to demonstrate his or her leadership competence.Footnote ¹⁸ These possibilities suggest that conflict may provide opportunities for democratic leaders to enhance their prospects for political survival.

Other research suggests that there is a conditional relationship between conflict and elections. An examination of American cases suggests that support for military operations – and, hence, the leadership – does not decline inexorably as casualties mount.Footnote ¹⁹ Instead, voters may be ‘defeat phobic’ and evaluate the wisdom of military operations on the basis of expected success. Another view privileges the role of an operation's policy objectives, finding that the type of goals a conflict aims to achieve influences public support.Footnote ²⁰ Still othersFootnote ²¹ find evidence favoring a calculating public that weighs the costs (casualties) and benefits (goals) of conflict.Footnote ²² If popular policy successes that are achieved at sufficiently low costs bode well for incumbent leaders, conditions that increase public support for military operations are likely to translate into electoral benefits as well. Indeed, democratic leaders appear to be aware of this possibility. Democracies tend to win the wars they fight, and to do so at a relatively lower cost than their autocratic counterparts.Footnote ²³ Democratic leaders also appear to view the public as casualty phobic and seek to minimize battlefield casualties.

Despite such efforts to maximize favorable conditions, voters are likely to evaluate the conditions of a conflict, much like the economic conditions, subjectively. Regardless of the oft-mentioned ‘objective facts on the ground’, voters’ perceptions of conflict conditions are likely to be important. If voters believe that their leader is a competent manager of issues such as international conflict, the leader is likely to be rewarded. Indeed, such rewards may complicate the usual judgements of voters, which are characterized by the relationship between economic performance and electoral outcomes. In contrast, voter perceptions of incompetence (that is, foreign policy failure) may lead to electoral punishment, and may even outweigh the rewards associated with good economic performance. In other words, conflict participation confuses voter judgements concerning leader competence.

The sources of such confusion are rooted in the conflict itself. Leaders have incentives to obfuscate the goals, expected costs and likelihood of success in order to build and maintain broad support for military operations, while outmaneuvering critics. For instance, leaders tend to identify multiple goals or rationales for engaging in conflict. While some goals may resonate with a given voter, others may not. The accomplishment of any goal can be characterized as success by the leadership, but if a realized goal does not resonate with a voter, s/he is unlikely to credit the leadership with success. Moreover, the opposition may be able to realistically depict the conflict as too costly or unnecessary.Footnote ²⁴ However if the opposition fails to offer a popular alternative to the conflict, the leadership may win the ‘least worst choice’ vote.

Overall, conflict participation provides confusing information to voters about the leadership's abilities. The conduct of a conflict, as well as how it is interpreted subsequently, is likely to contribute to noise around voters’ perceptions. To put it another way, voters may be more (or less) likely to accurately evaluate the leadership's abilities when interstate conflict is introduced into the calculation. Additional uncertainty arises when those preferences, in combination with parties’ platforms, are translated into actual vote choices. Do individuals choose to use their votes as sanctioning devices (consistent with retrospective voting), or as a way of influencing future policy direction (prospective voting)? How do ideological orientations or perceptions of issue ownership determine which parties voters support? Thus the influence of traditional measures of aggregate levels of vote support (for example, economic conditions) may wane when compared to salient foreign policy outcomes.Footnote ²⁵ For these reasons, we hypothesize that our ability to predict vote shares using traditional economic voting models will vary with the presence of international dispute involvement.

The Problem of Heteroskedasticity

Suppose that we incorporate a measure of conflict into a traditional economic voting model. Such a model, which specifies only the non-stochastic influences on the average expected vote share, assumes that the voting public responds to all conflicts in the same way and to the same degree (on average). However the discussion of the research above indicates that the effect of conflict is likely to influence the average expected vote share differently, depending on a variety of influences. Indeed, in order to facilitate more precise explanations of electoral outcomes using our heteroskedastic economic voting model, we should adopt a statistical approach that accounts for the variance around electoral outcomes.

First, consider a traditional economic voting model Y = Xβ + ε, where Y is a random variable of vote share, X β is a matrix of explanatory variables (such as previous vote share, GDP growth, etc) and their effects, and ε is a stochastic component with mean 0 and variance σ ². Y is called a random variable because it varies randomly across the hypothetical replications of this dataset.Footnote ²⁶ Unfortunately, we only observe the realized variable, y, which complicates our goal of making inferences about the systematic components of the random variable, Y. While most scholarly attention is focused on the systematic component of y (X β), we suggest that it is also important to determine the variation in the dependent variable when the systematic components do not change; this represents the size of the stochastic component (σ ²). If our goal is to use the realized variable y to make inferences about the random variable Y, then we want our estimates to be correct on average (unbiasedness) and we want more confidence in the precision of our estimate (efficiency).Footnote ²⁷ Unfortunately, in studies of comparative voting, political scientists typically do not have an infinite number of samples of the random variable to allow us to obtain the correct estimate, on average. Without an infinite number of samples (Y), how can we be sure that the one realized variable (y) we have is close to the true population value?

Our proposed solution for heteroskedasticity is to estimate a heteroskedastic regression, in which we can explicitly model the stochastic component (ε) as a function of explanatory variables. This is certainly not a recent development, as there are excellent examples of scholars who theorize and explicitly model the sources of non-constant error variance in voting models.Footnote ²⁸ In this case, we theorize that the variance of our stochastic component (σ ²) is positively related to involvement in international disputes.

The contribution of the heteroskedastic economic voting model is that traditional economic voting models risk making misleading inferences if they ignore the salience of conflict. First, while the βs will be unbiased, they will be more inefficient; the variation of β around its mean will be greater, therefore increasing the potential that the one estimate that we produce is vastly different from the true estimate.Footnote ²⁹ Secondly, ignoring heteroskedasticity in the context of ordinary least square (OLS) produces biased estimates of the standard errors, invalidating confidence intervals and the traditionally used F and t tests.Footnote ³⁰ In the Results section, we demonstrate that failing to model the role of exogenous shocks such as conflict produces non-spherical errors, which causes us to underestimate our uncertainty regarding our predictions. Finally, by studying the ‘variance-altering causes’ of vote share, we gain considerable leverage on a novel hypothesis, which allows us to produce a ‘more accurate and thorough discussion’ of electoral outcomes.Footnote ³¹ In the next section we discuss the data collection and estimation procedures.

Research Design

To test our hypothesis, we examine government parties’ vote shares in twenty-four established democracies from 1965–2000.Footnote ³² The unit of analysis is the government party/election.Footnote ³³ Our dependent variable is each government party's Vote Share at election t. We follow Powell and WhittenFootnote ³⁴ and include each party's vote share in the previous election (Vote Share (V_{t −1} )). We expect that this coefficient will be positive, which will demonstrate ‘the fairly stable base of party support from election to election’.Footnote ³⁵ By including the lagged dependent variable, the substantive interpretation of our model becomes one of predicting gains or losses, controlling for previous bases of support.Footnote ³⁶

Our key theoretical variable is the number of hostile militarized interstate disputes (MID) that occurred in the election cycle. We focus our analysis on hostile disputes (uses of force and war) because they tend to be more salient for voters than more minor disputes (threats or displays of force).Footnote ³⁷ These data are drawn from the Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) dataset.Footnote ³⁸ We expect that Hostile MIDs will positively affect the variance of vote change (since they will increase the unpredictability of election outcomes). As a control variable, we also include Hostile MIDs in the mean equation. Yet one should be cautious about inferring too much from those results, given that the variable is included additively and therefore does not begin to honor the conditional expectations discussed above.

While a variety of variables reflect a country's economic performance, we include the Change in Real GDP Per Capita from the Penn World Tables Version 6.2.Footnote ³⁹ If the election occurs in the first six months of the year, we use the previous year's value. To ensure that we produce a complete model specification, we also include the annual unemployment rate and the first-differenced annual inflation series from the World Bank's World Development Indicators. The expectation is that worsening economic conditions will reduce governing parties’ vote shares.

To control for the possibility that voters hold government parties accountable differently based on the features of the system or the characteristics of the government, we also include the following variables: Majority is coded 1 if the government parties collectively hold a majority of seats in parliament, Coalition is coded 1 if more than one party controls a cabinet portfolio and Executive is coded 1 if the government party controls the prime minister. The expectation is that having a minority or coalition government may moderate the common occurrence of government parties losing votes in subsequent elections, while holding the executive portfolio may exacerbate such a loss.Footnote ⁴⁰ We created these variables based on the government data provided by Woldendorp, Keman and Budge.Footnote ⁴¹ Finally, to take into account the potential electoral advantage that government parties have in determining the timing of elections,Footnote ⁴² we created the Percentage of Time Left in the Constitutional Inter-election Period (CIEP). This variable calculates the percentage of time left in the election cycle when the election occurred; values closer to 100 indicate elections early in the election cycle.Footnote ⁴³ We then interact this variable with Executive to control for the electoral benefits that an executive's party may receive by opportunistically calling for early elections.Footnote ⁴⁴

Discussion and Conclusion

We argue that it is difficult to accurately predict election results using traditional economic voting models because various elements make foreign policy issues salient for some voters and parties, but not others. We propose a heteroskedastic economic voting model that is easily estimated with most statistical packages. More importantly, evaluating the role of international dispute involvement with heteroskedastic regressions allows us to effectively model these impacts. We demonstrate that international dispute involvement increases the variance around those election results. Contrary to early research on public opinion about foreign policy,Footnote ⁴⁹ leaders are not ‘waltzing before a blind audience’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, voters pay attention to these events to such an extent that our models based on accountability for economic performance become much less accurate.

We agree with Braumoeller'sFootnote ⁵¹ sentiment that variance is the forgotten moment, which has unfortunate implications for the adequacy of voting models. During elections following conflict, we will, on average, get the correct estimate (if our estimator is unbiased), but our variability will be much larger (more inefficient) which is problematic because we want to be correct more often and ensure that our realized variable is closer to the true random variable. By ignoring the role of foreign policy outcomes, we risk making misleading inferences about the effects of economic growth, unemployment and inflation on electoral support. Indeed, ignoring the variance-altering effects of international conflict is one possible explanation for the often uneven findings regarding economic conditions.Footnote ⁵²

Elections following international conflict incorporate additional layers of uncertainty. These are the toughest elections to predict for a reason: we know little about how voters respond to conflict, which is precisely why our error variance increases. It is possible that the salience of other issues (for example, the economy) decreases as a result of costly disputes. Moreover, we currently lack cross-national theories that specify how voters respond to disputes in terms of which parties they support: do voters refrain from changing horses mid-race, or do they throw the bastards out? If voters decide to sanction government parties and shift their support, which other parties then see boosts? Are these shifts in support moderated by ideological orientations (of voters or parties), or by clarity of responsibility?Footnote ⁵³ We provide aggregate evidence that is consistent with the patterns SingerFootnote ⁵⁴ observes at the individual level regarding the ability of foreign policy issues to disrupt the list of issues that voters traditionally consider to be important.

If producing accurate empirical models is a priority, then for all of these reasons, it is imperative to recognize the effects of international disputes on the variance of vote shares. While we propose a methodological solution to non-constant error variance, it would be foolish to underemphasize the importance of producing theoretically grounded, well-specified models of voting behavior. Ultimately, scholars should be motivated to make these variance coefficients statistically insignificant by producing a better model specification of the mean, with the goal of getting the residuals to be white noise. We cannot stress the importance of model specification enough, as data can appear to be heteroskedastic due to omitted variable bias, incorrect functional form, the presence of outliers, etc.Footnote ⁵⁵ Until we have stronger theories that produce models with more accurate specifications, we will continue to observe larger error variances due to conflict.

A particularly fruitful source of theory regarding the effects of conflict is the literature on critical events. Critical events are exogenous shocks that have the potential to destabilize governments,Footnote ⁵⁶ due to changes in the parties’ positions on key issues, the salience of those issues or the distribution of seats.Footnote ⁵⁷ Hostile international disputes can influence all three of these factors, which suggests that the domestic consequences of international conflict are vastly understated. We present preliminary evidence that indicates that disputes – as potentially critical events – can upset the salience of domestic issues as well as the distribution of seats (that is, votes). Additional research can explore whether involvement in international disputes influences the types of issues that parties emphasize in campaigns, the stability of certain governing arrangements or individual-level responses to these events.