TY - JOUR
AU - Mackie, M.
AB - THE ELECTORAL CYCLE AND THE ASYMMETRY OF GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION POPULARITY: AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECONOMIC CONDITIONS AND POLITICAL POPULARITY* W. L. MILLER AND M. MACKIE Unhiersity of Strarlrclyde Two recent articles in Political Studies have used regression and spectral analyses of monthly Gallup poll data to investigate the factors influencing the popularity of British governments over the last quarter century. Goodhart and Bhansali used the monthly series for unemployment and retail price inflation as predictors of popularity and concluded that ‘the apparent sensitivity of political popularity to economic conditions, as shown by the equations seems almost too much to credit.” Frey and Garbers2 contested this conclusion on two grounds. First that the existence of a correlation between unemployment and popularity does not indicate which variable causes the other. They argued that popularity might cause unemployment, or at least that unpopularity might force the govern- ment to reduce unemployment. Secondly they argued that the popularity series could be adequately represented simply as an autoregressive process with each month’s popularity being a function of the previous month’s popularity plus some random shock. We present here an alternative explanation of the data patterns. When two series are correlated 
TI - The Electoral Cycle and the Asymmetry of Government and Opposition Popularity: An Alternative Model of the Relationship between Economic Conditions and Political Popularity
JF - Political Science
DO - 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1973.tb01159.x
DA - 1973-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/the-electoral-cycle-and-the-asymmetry-of-government-and-opposition-8BjtF2iuEV
SP - 263
EP - 279
VL - 21
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -